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.
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Hymn
Blessed Assurance
Mahalia Jackson's reading of Fanny Crosby's 1873 hymn turns a text about certainty into a performance that argues for it, note by note, rather than simply stating it.
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Blessed Assurance (Brandon Lake)
Brandon Lake's arena-worship arrangement of Fanny Crosby's hymn adds a modern bridge and a full band build that plays well live, at some cost to the text's original plainness.
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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.
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Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
The Tabernacle Choir's Mack Wilberg arrangement is the reason this 1758 hymn returned to the choir's own church hymnal -- a big, carefully built reading that turns a first-person confession into something a congregation-sized choir can sing as 'we.'
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Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing (Sufjan Stevens)
Sufjan Stevens recorded his banjo-led version in 2002 for a Christmas EP and released it in 2006 in the Songs for Christmas box set -- a hymn about waiting, recast as an Advent song, that builds to an unaccompanied finish.
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Great Is Thy Faithfulness (George Beverly Shea)
George Beverly Shea introduced Thomas Chisholm's 1923 hymn to Billy Graham crusade audiences in the 1950s, turning a relatively obscure text into a standard through sheer repetition in front of the largest live audiences gospel music has ever had.
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How Great Thou Art
George Beverly Shea didn't write a word of 'How Great Thou Art' -- he just sang it roughly a hundred times over one sixteen-week crusade until an obscure translated hymn became a standard.
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How Great Thou Art
Carrie Underwood and Vince Gill's 2011 televised duet went viral within days -- and Underwood liked the moment enough to record the hymn again, a decade later, on her own terms.
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How Great Thou Art
Elvis Presley's first competitive Grammy win, out of fourteen nominations across his career, came for a gospel record -- and 'How Great Thou Art' is the reason why.
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It Is Well with My Soul
Mahalia Jackson's 1968 recording treats Horatio Spafford's grief-forged hymn with the same restraint Spafford's own words ask for -- and lets the power stay in reserve until the very end.
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Precious Lord, Take My Hand
Mahalia Jackson's 1956 recording of Thomas Dorsey's grief-born plea, made with just a piano and an organ, is the version that fixed the song in American memory -- Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorite, and a 2012 Grammy Hall of Fame inductee.
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