Amazing Grace

Recorded live in January 1972 at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, with the Rev. James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir. Atlantic released it as a double album on 1 June 1972. It sold more than two million copies in the United States, earned a double platinum certification and won the 1973 Grammy for Best Soul Gospel Performance. It is the best-selling disc of her career and the highest-selling live gospel album. The 1999 two-CD edition, The Complete Recordings, adds unreleased takes and labels the shows as Thursday 13 and Friday 14 January. Her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, speaks on one track.

Jon Landau, writing in Rolling Stone in 1972, called it a virtuoso display of gospel pyrotechnics. Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic. Pitchfork's Jason King wrote in 2018 that her best album might be Amazing Grace. Rolling Stone ranked it 154 in its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums. Sydney Pollack filmed the sessions, but he did not use a clapperboard, which left picture and sound hard to match, and the film premiered on 12 November 2018, three months after Franklin's death.