Amazing grace

The Auditorio de Tenerife is staging the concert Amazing Grace 50th. A gospel celebration to Aretha Franklin, a tribute to the album by the American legend, the best-selling gospel album that is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its release in Los Angeles in 1972.

Amazing Grace 50th. A Gospel Celebration to Aretha Franklincelebrates the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most important pop music recordings of the 20th century. The creation of this production, which will present the songs of the original LP in full along with some hits by Aretha Franklin, would not have been possible without the passionate participation of the stars of this story: The Black Heritage Choir, a selection of singers from the Mississippi Mass Choir, which under the musical direction of Jerry Calvin Smith, the organist at Farish Street Baptist Church, lecturer at Jackson State University and pianist of the great choir of the state of Mississippi, will bring the sound of the gospel back to Europe in the summer and Christmas of 2022.

Aretha Franklin recorded Amazing Grace in the black heart of Los Angeles fifty years ago. On 13 and 14 January 1972 in a small church in the neighbourhood of Watts, the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, she once again became the preacher’s daughter and gave the history of gospel music, with the collaboration of James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir, its best-selling record. Among the expectant audience of fans from the neighbourhood and a handful of Californian hipsters, some stars of black America dazzled along with a legend of international rock who still did not believe they were immortal. Clara Ward, one of the great influences of Aretha and the founder of the Famous Ward Singers; the man with the million-dollar voice, Reverend CL Franklin, father of the Queen of Soul and main source of support for Martin Luther King; without forgetting a very young Mick Jagger, who always acknowledged his debt to generations of bluesmen and anonymous musicians.

Amazing Grace is one of the most beautiful pop music albums of the 20th century. Its repertoire, with allusions to the modernity of Marvin Gaye and Carole King and pearls of the new tradition created by Thomas Dorsey and Herbert Brewster, is taken from the hymn books that could be found in any black church from Memphis, Tennessee, to Detroit, Michigan, in the Golden Age of Gospel. The church-going girl that Aretha was come together in those sessions, with the powerful voice of a great singer in full possession of all of her registers, images and feelings of a recent past shared by all the congregation. The result is moving because the members of the choir, musicians and the public share the secret codes hidden in the songs which they know by heart. Consequently, Amazing Grace echoes the magic that only live concerts can have, created from heat, humanity and joy. It is also a song of nostalgia for the good old times and an emotive vindication of the men and women who made the gospel culture possible through the black churches of the United States.