Amazing Grace
Judy Collins didn't write a note of it, produce a hook onto it, or add a single instrument — and her 1970 a cappella 'Amazing Grace' still became a transatlantic hit. The whole achievement is in what she chose not to do.
Read review →Genre
Folk
Be Thou My Vision
Van Morrison's 1991 reading treats an 8th-century Irish hymn as source material for his own loose, incantatory style, rather than as a text he has to perform carefully.
Read review →
Blessed Assurance (Judy Collins)
Judy Collins moves Fanny Crosby's hymn out of the sanctuary and into the same clear-soprano folk register she used to turn other writers' songs into standards -- a quieter, more private read on a text usually sung as a group declaration.
Read review →