Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace is the third live album by American singer-songwriter Aretha Franklin, originally released in June 1972 via Atlantic Records.

Aretha Franklin disproved the notion that once you leave the church, you can't go back. She returned in triumph on this 1972 double album, making what might be her greatest release ever in any style. Her voice was chilling, making it seem as if God and the angels were conducting a service alongside Franklin and everyone in attendance. Her versions of "How I Got Over" and "You've Got A Friend" are legendary.

Recorded live over two days at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, Amazing Grace is a powerful and poignant double album wherein Aretha extols a lifetime spent under the tutelage of her father to deliver an intense spiritual lesson through music to the assembled parishioners.

Presided over by the Reverend James Cleveland, and backed by the Southern California Community Choir, Aretha manifests her faith to God in primal screams, low moans, and spine-tingling declarations of devotion. With only simple instrumentation, she is still commanding of her audience; forceful, convincing, and irresistable.

Whether slow and sultry on “Mary, Don’t You Weep, turning secular songs into devout hymns (as on “You’ve Got A Friend” and Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy”), or magnificently evangelical in her unique interpretations of traditional songs of praise like “Amazing Grace” and “God Will Take Care Of You”, she never once fails to connect to the heart, the spirit and the soul of the listener.

John Hammond, the legendary A&R man who discovered Aretha and signed her to Columbia, said in the album’s original liner notes: “This will be the album I suspect that will go down in history as both Aretha’s most shining hour and the final breakthrough of Black gospel music to mass appreciation.”

He wasn’t wrong: winning a Grammy at the 1972 ceremony, Amazing Grace went on to become not only Aretha’s most successful album, but the biggest selling gospel album of all time.

Check out the tracks:  Wholy Holy ; Mary Don't You Weep ; Amazing Grace ; God Will Take Care of You and You’ve Got A Friend.

This double album 2LP record set is a reissue (September 2014) on 180 gram vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve, pressed in Europe.