In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs. Her latest stop is Philadelphia, for a conversation with author, professor and MacArthur Fellow Imani Perry.
In January, Time magazine published its third annual "The Closers" list, a roster of "extraordinary Black leaders working toward greater equality." Imani Perry is one of them, and the headline of her profile reads "Imani Perry Imagines a Better Future by Writing About the Past." As the author of books including South to America and Black in Blues, Perry reflects on contemporary life through a historical lens with the goal of creating community, dialogue and empathy around the central binding agent of shared ancestral experience and collective contemplation.
That is also the goal of my work as a musician, traversing the landscape of American music to show how profoundly our songs connect us. What we hear in our music are echoes of collective histories, a map of crossroads where our journeys converge.
So my conversation with Perry about one of our oldest and most beloved songs was a meeting of minds and mission. "Amazing Grace" predates the founding of the nation; it was written in 1772 by John Newton, an English sailor and slave trader who experienced a profound religious conversion, renouncing his past to become an Anglican priest and an ardent abolitionist. His personal story of awakening and redemption is reflected in the hymn's lyrics, describing the "sweet sound" of God's grace in saving "a wretch like me." The song is a recognition of and repentance for America's original sin, an assurance that no wrong is too definitive for the chance of redemption, a promise that we can always do better.
That theme — redemption, reinvention and second chances — is at the heart of the American experiment. From the first settlers and pioneers to every new arrival who ever disembarked at Ellis Island and everyone risking everything to come here today, the idea of America as a place of opportunity and possibility, a place to reimagine your life and reshape your future, is both mythology and reality, a shared dream and purpose across generations and genealogies.
As we reflect on these 250 years of America's history, confronting the "many dangers, toils and snares" through which we've already come, and as we look to the future, recognizing all the work that's yet to be done, this old song reminds us that it is grace — mercy and kindness, hope and forgiveness — that will ultimately "lead us home."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Downes: It's so interesting the journey "Amazing Grace" has taken – through American culture, but specifically Black culture. And it's just become so universal. There are over 3000 recordings of this song in the Library of Congress. It must be performed millions of times every year, and every time I hear it, I ask myself in some way: What is this thing called "grace?"
Imani Perry: Grace is that unearned gift, something divine within that you are born with. And there's something about a kind of natural human capacity and divinity that the song captures.
There's an apocryphal story that the song is a direct response to Newton's experience of being horrified while working aboard a slave ship. We do know that he eventually became an abolitionist. So we can read in the song this sense of encountering the lowest point of devastation and still having a sense of the divine and possibility. And that's part of why the song is so resilient, and maybe why the song has a particular power in the U.S. context — this place that's made of dreams and also their deferrals and disappointment.
Yes, grace as forgiveness and redemption, but also these second chances, this starting over.
I think that in the lowest point, the seed of possibility exists, that makes a second chance. Something that we can hope for.
It was at least as early as the Civil War when this song passed into Black American culture. I think so much about all of those songs, those spirituals and work songs. And yes, the seed in them of something hoped for, that's better. But also just the idea of singing them as an act of resilience and resistance.
We don't often think about the fact that the first several generations of enslaved people in this country hadn't necessarily adopted Christianity. And something happens in the midst of the turn to the 19th century, the second great awakening, when the spiritual practices of West Africans — that often had the sort of charismatic and ecstatic quality — is coming up amongst European-Americans. And there's a merging that happens.
And so it makes sense then that this song would begin to move into the Black community, as Christianity did. And as a form of Christianity that really emphasized the story of Exodus, the vision of freedom, but also a sense of divine possibility beyond the terms of what it meant to be here, subjugated. Redemption, transformation, all those aspects of faith took on heightened importance for people held captive.
The song then — being a song that comes from the heart and mind of someone who's becoming an abolitionist — becomes a song that can speak to the descendants of those who were in the hold of the ship.
I'm not a religious person. I define faith as belief in my fellow humans. And this song speaks so clearly to that as well. I mean, it's open to interpretation.
It really is. And I think that's part of what's so wonderful about all the varying musical interpretations.
This idea of grace has been, from one generation to the next, the thing that keeps pulling us together — the belief in each other and in this experiment and this promise, as murky as it has seemed.
This project of mine started as a reflection on the 250th anniversary of the country. But so quickly, I understood that this was not nearly as much about the past as it is about the future. And that history is built on the future.
I often think about what is the usable past. Because there are billions of facts and artifacts, and we make choices about what we hold on to from the past in order to allow us to move through the future and to share something that can be carried on with our descendants or the young people in our lives.
Turning back to "Amazing Grace," my favorite version is Aretha Franklin's from 1972, which was the year I was born. And she's on that double album cover wearing African attire. But it's very much in the Black American musical tradition. The whole album is a gospel album, but it is her best-selling album of all time. And without question, that moment was about the future, even though she was drawing on tradition, in order to propel her voice into what was coming.
If you think about the early '70s, the Black experience was not the best of times. So many milestones were reached during the civil rights movement, but I remember my mom talking to me about the early '70s being a time when so many promises seemed broken, and do we have to start all over again? It's really interesting that Aretha made that record in that moment.
And I think "Amazing Grace" is one of the clearest examples of a song that means so many different things to so many people. It gets passed around, doesn't stay the property of anybody.
The way that this particular song is available to Americans is a tradition. I love it because it is a song that isn't boastful, it's not Pollyanna-ish. It's a song about the difficulty of existence.
Also, weirdly, this song gets pulled out for all sorts of state occasions. And it's not a patriotic song, but we think of it as a quintessential American song.
Yes, and there's a fundamental tension from the beginning [of this country], between visions of liberty and the reality of enslavement, and the oppression of the indigenous people. It's not a straight line, but the tension is there and we have to work it out as best we can during the course of our lives individually, but also in community with other people.
And maybe we all understand that on a very deep level. And that's why this song speaks so clearly.
I think there's something meaningful about trying to find the kind of resonance with each person who's sitting across from you — trying to figure out how to be in right relation. And that does not mean agreement, necessarily, on anything. But there is value in trying to figure it out. And in order to do that, you have to leave open possibility.
Tom Huizenga and Vincent Acovino produced the audio version of this story. Tom Huizenga produced the digital version.
(Playlist image courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)
Copyright 2026 NPR
