Rock of Ages

Amy Grant made “Rock of Ages” the title track of 2005’s Rock of Ages… Hymns and Faith, her second hymns collection after 2002’s Legacy, produced with Brown Bannister and her husband, country singer Vince Gill. The decision to make it a duet – Grant and Gill trading the hymn’s lines back and forth rather than one voice carrying it alone – is the single choice that distinguishes this reading most sharply from the week’s other two. Toplady’s text is addressed, formally, to God; sung between two people who are also married to each other, the “simply to Thy cross I cling” lyric picks up an additional, unmistakably domestic layer of meaning that neither Tennessee Ernie Ford’s solo 1956 reading nor Johnny Cash’s solo 1975 one could carry.

Musically, this is the most produced and contemporary of the three versions by a wide margin – a full CCM arrangement, polished vocal blending, radio-ready without tipping into anything gaudy. That polish is a legitimate choice rather than a shortcoming: where Ford and Cash both lean into plainness as the source of the hymn’s power, Grant and Gill are making a different, equally defensible argument – that a text this old can still sound completely at home in a present-tense, fully arranged recording without losing its weight. The album backs that argument up institutionally; it topped Billboard’s Top Christian Albums chart and won Grant a Grammy for Best Southern, Country, or Bluegrass Gospel Album.

Of the week’s three readings, this is the one least interested in sounding historical, and that’s by design – a couple, not a lone voice, treating a 250-year-old hymn as current, married, and still very much theirs to sing.

7.9/10 – the most contemporary and most literally intimate of this week’s three versions.

Hero image: Amy Grant at Vince Gill’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, 2012, by Angela George, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.