Amazing Grace

Some pieces are so beautiful they need few words. 

That's true of this new animated video by John Scher, out today on The Atlantic, accompanying Joan Baez's version of the "The President Sang Amazing Grace," a song included on her final album, Whistle Down The Wind. 

“I was driving when I heard ‘The President Sang Amazing Grace,’” Baez told The Atlantic here, “and I had to pull over to make sure I heard whose song it was because I knew I had to sing it.”

The song was originally written and performed by Zoe Mulford following the 2015 mass shooting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Here's more from The Atlantic:

“[When Barack] Obama sang ‘Amazing Grace’ at the service for the Charleston Church shooting victims, it was deeply moving,” Scher told The Atlantic. “Somehow Obama, with his humble singing voice, turned grief into grace. With humility, compassion, and a two-hundred-year-old hymn, he made us feel that the evil deeds of a sick individual could not shake the bonds of our common humanity.” For Scher, Obama’s performance expressed the emotions of “what it was like to be an American on that day— to have a great leader lift us up from despair.”

###