By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2012
In late December 2012, KPCC 89.3 reporter Christopher Johnson aired a 40th-anniversary look at Aretha Franklin’s 1972 recording of Amazing Grace at Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts. The piece was structured as a place visit — Johnson going to the South LA church where the live gospel recording had been made under James Cleveland’s musical direction. The original FishbowlLA framing was straightforwardly admiring; Johnson’s piece was the kind of public-radio reportage that captured a specific LA cultural-history moment.
Then
The 1972 Amazing Grace sessions had produced what remains the best-selling live gospel album in history. Aretha Franklin had recorded across two nights at Temple Missionary Baptist with James Cleveland leading the Southern California Community Choir; Sydney Pollack had filmed the sessions for what was meant to be a concurrent documentary release. The film had not been released in 1972 because of technical sync-issues between the picture and the audio; the legal status of the unreleased footage had been disputed for decades.
The KPCC 2012 piece captured the 40th-anniversary moment when the album was being reconsidered as a major historical artifact. The church itself was still standing at 8425 S. Compton Avenue; the broader gospel community in LA was reflecting on what had been made there.
The Take Two program on KPCC ran the piece. Christopher Johnson’s reporting drew on church-community sources, gospel historians, and the broader documentary record of the 1972 sessions.
Now
The Amazing Grace film that had been delayed since 1972 was finally released in November 2018 — fifty-one years after the recording. The eventual theatrical release came after producer Alan Elliott had spent years acquiring the rights from Sydney Pollack’s estate and the technical sync-issues had been resolved. The film grossed about $5 million in limited release and was nominated for major documentary awards. It is widely considered one of the most-significant concert documentaries finally to emerge from Hollywood’s vaults.
Aretha Franklin died in August 2018 at 76 from pancreatic cancer — three months before the Amazing Grace film’s theatrical release. She did not live to see the documentary released, but she had been involved in some of the rights-clearance discussions in the years before her death.
Christopher Johnson has continued at KPCC and across the broader public-radio ecosystem, with subsequent reporting on LA music history and culture. KPCC itself has continued through the 2018-2020 integration with LAist that produced the current KPCC-LAist editorial structure. Temple Missionary Baptist Church continues to operate at the same Compton Avenue location.
The 2012 piece reads now as a documented public-radio moment six years before the Amazing Grace film’s eventual release made the broader cultural reconsideration permanent. Johnson’s piece was, in retrospect, an early entry in the long arc of the album-and-film’s continuing recognition.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.