“NOTHING has tortured my soul more than knowing one of the GREATEST recorded moments in gospel history was just gonna sit on the shelf and collect dust,” Questlove wrote in a lengthy Instagram post a few years back, regarding the anguished fate of Amazing Grace. Which makes the unseen documentation of this momentous occasion all the more agonizing. Forty-six years later, the album still stands as the best-selling live gospel LP of all time and the pinnacle in Aretha’s formidable run of Atlantic LPs, capping a run that spans from 1967’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through 1972’s Young, Gifted And Black. That particular feeling, of being in the presence of both the ineffable and the irrepressible, is one way to describe the majesty of Amazing Grace.
