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.
By Song Reviews · August 30, 2026
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.
Carrie Underwood and Vince Gill’s “How Great Thou Art” wasn’t recorded in a studio session built to produce a single – it happened live, on television, at the 2011 ACM special Girls’ Night Out: Superstar Women of Country. Underwood sang the opening verses alone before Gill joined for the second half, and the performance drew a standing ovation in the room and, within roughly two days of the clip hitting YouTube, a viral audience well beyond country radio’s usual reach. American Songwriter has called it “the single greatest Carrie Underwood live performance of all time” – a fan-and-press consensus more than an official title, but not an unreasonable one to reach for. The performance was later given a proper release, included as a live track on Underwood’s 2014 compilation Greatest Hits: Decade #1.
What makes the recording work is the contrast between the two voices rather than either one alone. Underwood’s opening is controlled and church-plain, close in spirit to Shea’s original restraint; Gill’s entrance shifts the performance into something closer to a duet between two people who trust each other completely, his tone warmer and rougher against her more polished belt. The key change into the final verse – Underwood holding a note that keeps climbing while the room audibly reacts in real time – is the moment that made the clip spread, and it holds up on replay precisely because nothing about it sounds engineered for virality. It’s just two country singers who happened to nail a hymn on a Tuesday-night TV special.
Underwood clearly felt the same way: a decade later, she re-recorded “How Great Thou Art” as a solo studio track for My Savior (2021), her first full gospel album, which won the Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album and hit No. 1 on the Christian albums chart. That second version is more polished and, by her own account, directly inspired by how the 2011 performance with Gill made her feel about the song – worth knowing, even though it’s the earlier live duet, not the later studio cut, that’s the actual subject of this review.
8.8/10 – a live TV moment that earned its virality the honest way, by being genuinely great rather than merely shareable.
Hero image: Carrie Underwood performing in Times Square, NYC, 2012. Photo: dephisticate / Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.