Strictly speaking, the name Amen Corner applies to the second shot at the 11th hole, all of the 12th, and the first two shots at the 13th, where there are a number of water hazards.
Wikipedia tells us that the name Amen Corner was first used for this section of the Augusta National course in an article in Sports Illustrated magazine about the 1958 Masters tournament. The writer of the article, Herbert Warren Wind, seems to have been inspired by the song Shoutin' in that Amen Corner, which was recorded in 1935 by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra.
There are several places in England called Amen Corner, the most famous one being near St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable tells us that this is where the monks and clergy of the cathedral would reach the final "Amen" of the Lord's Prayer, as they processed to the cathedral on the feast day of Corpus Christi. Other places on the route are known as Paternoster Row (pater noster being Latin for 'our father') and Ave Maria Lane. Brewer goes on to say that "Paternoster Row, Amen Corner and much of Ave Maria Lane were destroyed in an air raid on 28 December 1940."
Today, Amen Corner is a stub of road that leads to Amen Court, which is a row of houses built for clergymen in the 17th century. It was from his flat in Amen Court, in January 1958, that John Collins, the canon of St Paul's, started the the Campaign for Nuclear Disamament (CND). The Labour grandees Michael Foot and Denis Healey were also present at the meeting.
The website Knowledge of London has a photograph of Amen Court (captioned Amen Corner). This one has a similar photograph, and some others; this one has a photo of the Amen Corner street sign.
The first American use of the name Amen Corner seems to have been around 1897, to denote a meeting place at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Madison Square, New York. The New York State Republican Party leader Thomas C. Platt lived in the hotel, and used to hold meetings there; it was said that the other party members always used to agree with him. Barry Popik, in his "etymological dictionary ... of American words [etc.]", credits the journalist Edward Riggs of the New York Sun ("Riggs of the Sun") with attaching the name to the meeting place. He quotes several contemporary sources, including one from the Washington Post that explains the London origins of the name.
Around the same time (in the "late 19th or early 20th century" – Wikipedia), the American poet and novelist Thomas Chalmers Harbaugh wrote a poem entitled Trouble in the Amen Corner. The poem is about an old man who stands in the Amen Corner – the part of a church where the most vocally enthusiastic worshippers congregate – but who is shunned by his hypocritical fellow–churchgoers because his singing voice no longer meets the standard that they demand. It was made into a "country gospel" song in 1960 by Archie Campbell, who presented a country–flavoured network television variety show entitled Hee Haw. The song was covered by Jim Reeves in 1961, and has been by several other artists since then.
The Amen Corner is also the title of a 1954 play by the African–American writer James Baldwin – the follow–up to his fictionalised autobiography Go Tell it on the Mountain. But if you're British and of a similar vintage to me, you probably associate the name Amen Corner most closely with a 1960s Welsh pop group. Andy Fairweather–Low and his cohorts took their name from a weekly disco session in Cardiff; exactly where the disco session got its name from doesn't seem to be recorded!
© Haydn Thompson 2017