Curious's Journal

In high school I was involved with a Christian youth group called “Young Life”. Most of the time at the meetings was spent singing songs, and I fell in love with the arrangement and how they segragated the singing roles to Amazing Grace – years latter I was on a quest to find a reasonable recording… and found it:

curious.org/journal/?p=50

Years later that linked stopped working and quest was on again, and I found the recording from the song writter:

curious.org/journal/?p=2129

While looking for new Amazing Grace covers, I found ANOTHER person who has recorded it and added a verse:

Don’t know if Paul Coleman got the rights to Tony Congi’s song writting or not… but it was intresting to find another person record it using a new name.

I wrote previously about mixing and matching amazing grace to other tunes… figured I’d compile a list of them…

All of the below songs are supposedly common meter… which means you can replace or merge lyrics  between all these tunes, and they will still “work”

America the Beautiful
Brighton Camp
The Marine Hymn
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
O Susannah
The Happy Wanderer (verses)
The Alpha Phi Omega toast song
I’ve been Working on the Railroad
Amazing Grace
Giligan’s Island/What child is this
Greensleeves
House of the Rising Sun
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
most of Emily Dickinson’s poems
The Yellow Rose of Texas
Joy to the World
Stairway to Heaven
Auld Lang Syne
Beverly Hillbillies Theme
Ghost Riders in the Sky
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
You’ve Got to Hide Your Head
I’d like to teach the world to sing

Ok, back in high school I used to go to Young Life meets… every so often we would go to a fellow student’s house sing Christian songs. The song the stuck with me the most was their version of Amazing Grace. I had found it once before. It is no longer seems to be available on the site it was on (checked archive.org too)… Rather then bore you with details (note, this is nowhere near as cool as being part of a large peer group singing the song, yes there were male/female singing parts as is done in this version):

Here are the lyrics.

Here is the itunes link. (btw you can get 5 free itunes songs if you use facebook )

So, I went on my quest to find the version of amazing grace that “young life” sang… (I found it once years ago, but lost it)… ANYWAYS… in that quest I found Amazing Grace set to diffrent tunes on YouTube… such as

“The Gilligan’s Island Theme Song”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=pcvLk19KqLo

Or “House of the Rising Sun”:

There are various blogs that mention that Amazing Grace fits in Jingle Bells and Peaceful Easy Feeling…

The “Magic” that lets this work is the fact that there are so many songs that use Common Metre
For a better description and a list of songs you can mix and match:

www.andover.edu/english/jgould/singingmuse/sillysets.html

Off and on for the past several years I’d been searching for the “young life” version of amazing grace.. and I FOUND it!

www.christianmp3.com/songinfo.cfm?songid=284&bandid=445

not the most professional recording in the world.. but it’s better then the tape recorded versions that are scattered around the net..

How do I know of young life? how do I know about this version of amazing grace?

BECAUSE it DOES!