About: Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken

"Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken", also called "Zion, or the City of God", is an 18th-century English hymn written by John Newton, who also wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace". Shape note composer Alexander Johnson set it to his tune "Jefferson" in 1818, and as such it has remained in shape note collections such as the Sacred Harp ever since. However, the hymn is most often set to the tune of Joseph Haydn's "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" (referred to in hymnals as "Austria"). In recent decades it has been sometimes replaced by "Abbot's Leigh". This was written for this text by in 1942 while he was a producer of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC and stationed at the village of Abbots Leigh. Multiple other tunes have also been used with the hymn.