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Abstract
With great command yet finesse, Rev. James Cleveland played the unmistakable Sol-Do (ascending 4th) of the familiar melody to “Amazing Grace” before suggesting, “The next song needs no introduction.” The affirming responses from those gathered at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church confirmed Cleveland’s supposition. His brief preface to the title track on Aretha Franklin’s 1972, double-platinum, live Gospel album, proved to be much more than a nod to its familiarity amongst those gathered that January evening. Likely an improvised remark, Cleveland’s (non)introduction indicated the ubiquity and implicit value of “Amazing Grace.”This thesis seeks to illuminate how “Amazing Grace” has been caught up in the economy of cultural capital. Beginning as a narrative hymn-text, it has evolved as a transhistorical, polysemic, and even ontologically ambiguous commodity/currency that is wielded purposefully or incidentally to authorize and authenticate performance practice, history, and positionality; to affirm and/or subvert American identity(s).