Songoftheday 9/11/17 - O say can you see by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming...
from the CD single The Star Spangled Banner (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #20 (one week) (1991); #6 (one week) (2001)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6 (1991); 4 (2001)
Today's song of the day comes from the late great Whitney Houston, who in the spring of 1991 had already claimed a pair of #1 pop hits from her third studio album I'm Your Baby Tonight with the title track and "All The Man That I Need". In January of 1991, Whitney was slated to perform the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Between the announcement and the game, the First Gulf War in Iraq had started, making this moment particularly poignant. Houston had already had a performance by her musical director Ricky Minor which changed the time signature and made her vocal performance more dramatic. The gamble paid off with what's considered by many (including myself) as the best rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" to date. Radio stations started to play it, and the demand by the public was so great that it was issued as a special charity single...
Whitney's performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" reached the top-20 on the American pop chart in March of 1991. It also appeared on Billboard's Adult Contemporary radio chart at #48. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Houston re-released the recording again to raise money for the charities for the New York Firefighters and Police, and that time it rocketed back on to the chart at #6, and made it to #30 on Billboard's R&B chart. The record even got to #5 in Canada. And it remains a hallmark moment in television history.
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One other artist has hit the American pop chart with a version of the national anthem, and it was done by Jose Feliciano of Puerto Rico who took his rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" to #50 in 1968, after he performed it at the World Series that year in a stunningly beautiful folk arrangement...
Here's Whitney's live performance of the anthem at a concert for war vets a couple months later, which in my mind is even more powerful than the pre-recorded Super Bowl take...
I watched this on HBO in 1991 and still get choked up.
Up tomorrow: Deep-voiced British pop singer is asking for assistance.
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