American Tricons

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Three stories from the American Icons series. How “Amazing Grace,” a song written by a slave trader, came to be a civil rights anthem. Plus, a novel that featured “Amazing Grace” and helped popularize it, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book helped promote the abolitionist cause, yet the term “Uncle Tom” became a pejorative for people who betray their race. And far from glorifying small-town life, Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” shocked readers when it came out in 1915 and tackled subjects like suicide and sex.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX.
0:11.5	This is Studio 360. I'm Curtis, and I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
0:16.7	This first level of garden. This is Thomas Jefferson's vegetable vegetable garden. I like to have the roasted chicken piece.
0:21.5	Very well done.
0:22.7	Editing is all about timing.
0:24.4	I try to get a little bit away from the actual subject.
0:27.0	You must get sick of your own voice, right?
0:29.3	Studio 360.
0:31.4	It's good.
0:32.0	Anderson.
0:36.2	There's exactly one old American hymn that everybody recognizes, and that moves people who have no feeling for the spiritual or religious, because it long ago transcended the church and became a folk song and an anthem for civil rights.
0:54.6	But its origins are unexpected and complicated.
0:59.1	As part of our American Icon series,
1:01.7	Trey K brings us the story of Amazing Grace.
1:19.7	In Sy48, a slave ship was heading back to England from Charleston, South Carolina.
1:25.3	After having discharged its cargo of African natives, they were getting closer to home,
1:28.7	just off the coast of Donegal, Ireland, when it banned.
1:32.5	The ship gets battered by a violent storm.
1:37.7	The boards of the hall are popping off, and water is gushing into the hole.
1:41.1	It seems certain that the boat is going to go down.
1:45.3	The captain and the crew work frantically to patch the leak.
1:51.6	The captain orders a man named John Newton onto the deck to steer the vessel.
	...

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