Aretha Franklin: Inauguration Superstar
By Michael Jones | January 18, 2021
BREAKING NEWS: people are exhausted from politics. It’s been a ghastly four years hectic time in American political history.
But since we’re about to have a presidential inauguration, one of the paramount events in culture, there’s good reason to focus on an American superhero.
No, not a political candidate. But Aretha Franklin.
The Queen of Soul has played a very special role in presidential inaugurations, perhaps more so than any pop culture figure. She performed at four inaugurations for three presidents, banging out patriotic classics and show tune blockbusters for a nation watching its story unfold. Let’s celebrate some moments where Aretha Franklin brought the people’s house down.
January 19, 1977
Forty-four years ago, D.C. outsider Jimmy Carter was elected president. The former Governor of Georgia and peanut farmer was a huge music buff. (Want to go down a rabbit hole of 70s music history? Check out the new documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President which takes a deep dive into Carter’s musical bonafides and how acts like the Allman Brothers, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Loretta Lynn, Paul Simon, the Staple Singers and more helped build support for Carter’s presidency.)
Carter’s love of music carried over to his inauguration. And that’s where we get Aretha Franklin’s first presidential performance, belting out a bunch of songs during the nationally broadcast Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Gala. The event, filmed at the Kennedy Center one night before Carter took the oath of office, was a smorgasbord of celebrities and musicians paying tribute to the newly elected 39th president.
Among them: Red Foxx, Muhammad Ali, Lauren Bacall, Linda Ronstadt (who, interestingly enough, was dating one of Carter’s rivals for the office, California Gov. Jerry Brown), and Bette Davis.
But the star of the show was Franklin, who in full 70s orange fur regalia blows the roof off the Kennedy Center. You can catch several performances of Aretha on this night. There’s “Rock With Me” from the soundtrack of the 1976 movie Sparkle starring Irene Cara. There’s also a Duke Ellington medley (part one here, and part two here).
But the performance that sends everyone in the Kennedy Center soaring: her rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which she does acapella at the end of the telecast. It’s probably one of the best performances of this song in its history, sounding both familiar but also original given the flair Franklin brings to the performance. Perhaps made extra special because right before Franklin sang it, self-proclaimed white supremacist John Wayne took the stage. Maybe Franklin was cleansing the auditorium and in some small way telegraphing a message that a new America could be on the horizon.
January 19, 1993 & January 19, 1997
Both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were self-described “superfans” of Aretha Franklin. So it was no surprise that when Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd president in January 1993, Franklin was on hand to perform. And show tunes were on the menu, at least for one of her numbers.
In the days leading up to Clinton’s inauguration, the National Mall became the site of “America’s Reunion,” more or less a trade show with vendors from all over the country, and performances from Franklin, Ray Charles, Michael Bolton, Michael Jackson, and more. (You can see a picture of this from the National Archives here, which makes the Mall look like a giant wedding reception under a series of tents).
But it was Franklin’s performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” at a pre-inauguration concert in Landover, Maryland, that many remember from Clinton’s first inauguration week.
Perhaps an odd choice for the start of a presidency, given the song comes from Les Misérables and is sung by the character Fantine after she’s fired from a factory job and her life descends into utter despair and misery. Yet, somehow, in the hands of Aretha Franklin the song becomes a hopeful tribute to the potential of tomorrow. This might be because Aretha tinkers with the lyrics and instead of singing “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed” in hopeless Anne Hathaway tears. Franklin belts “Life will not kill the dreams that we dream” and the whole entire arena floats up into the sky. Franklin was back at the Presidential Gala in 1997 for Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, where she joined Gordon Gecko Michael Douglas, Oda Mae Brown Whoopi Goldberg and Murphy Brown Candice Bergen who hosted a behemoth amount of performers for a live CBS concert at USAir Arena (oh the 90s and their airlines that no longer exist).
It takes some internet sleuthing to find performances from this shindig, but if you dig deep enough you’ll stumble across this duet from Aretha Franklin and James Taylor, “Shed a Little Light.” Whoopi Goldberg introduces them, and perhaps sums up Aretha Franklin better than anyone ever has: “the diva of American pop culture.”
It’s an upbeat performance that pays homage to Martin Luther King Jr., though perhaps an odd blending of voices (YouTube commenters aren’t too kind). But the message behind it—that we’re all connected via the same threads of humanity—is a perfect match for the hopeful tones of inaugurations.
January 20, 2009
Perhaps the most famous of Franklin’s inauguration performances—no doubt because it happened in the social media age and could be shared 500,000 times over—might be her turn at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
The day was already one for the history books with the election of the nation’s first Black president. Aretha’s performance made it extra special, marking her fourth and final inauguration. And it gave the internet one of its earliest memes: that legendary Swarovsky crystal encrusted bow pillbox hat.
Introduced by California Senator Dianne Feinstein, Franklin takes the inauguration stage at the U.S. Capitol and sends up a soaring rendition of the grade school music class staple “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” As NPR said of the performance, “She took the crowd to church in more ways than one,” noting the performance harkened back to Franklin’s early gospel sound.
And indeed, the hat went viral. So much so that the Detroit maker of it, Luke Song, saw thousands of orders spill in to his shop from customers who wanted a hat of their own. The hat has been featured in the Smithsonian Museum and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum, and (pending at least a few lawsuits) could end up in the eventual presidential library of Barack Obama.
All we know is that no matter where the hat ends up, the legacy of Franklin and presidential inaugurations will continue to shine every four years, as the worlds of music and politics inevitably collide.
Artists like Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, as well as Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez (tapped for this year’s inauguration for our 46th president, Joe Biden) certainly have the inauguration gravitas.
But no one quite fills the space in history that Aretha Franklin left. And that is well worth revisiting at least once every four years.
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.