For me, though, there is an affirming version, a best version, a version that makes me feel like the song and the country can just maybe live up to the very high bars they set for themselves but have never cleared. By November 2016, Aretha Franklin had performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” for at least a dozen major events, including Super Bowls, Ivy League graduations, and Obama’s first Fourth of July as president. She’d suffered through racist backlash to her version at the cursed 1968 Democratic National Convention, when she was only 26 and just emerging as The Queen of Soul, to become one of the song’s most interesting conduits. Almost every version she sang was fluid and new.
In a fur coat and a Detroit Lions stocking cap, Franklin, a 74-year-old daughter of the South and the Great Migration, sits at a shiny black Yamaha piano straddling the 50-yard line for the Thanksgiving Day game between the Lions and the Minnesota Vikings. The country had elected Donald Trump president 16 days earlier. The Lions and Vikings are middle-of-the-pack teams, both pushing for playoff spots, so they are anxious to get going. Players bounce on the balls of their feet and nod their heads like they’re still listening to pump-up jams.
Franklin does not care about time, because she has something to say. On the longest version of the anthem ever broadcast, Franklin works through the familiar words like she’s trying to find their meaning for the very first time, improvising alongside the organist Richard Gibbs, who hawk-eyes her for the changes. Her voice dips, dives, cracks. She shifts “perilous fight” to “perilous flight.” And when she finally reaches Key’s lyrics about seeing the flag by the light of the bombs, she repeatedly shouts the line, like she’s just as surprised as Key was so long ago.
At the Super Bowl, the anthem averages less than two minutes; Franklin is nearly three minutes into it when she reaches those lines, when the crowd finally begins to connect and roar back a response. When she arrives near the end, she comes again and again to “home of the brave,” pounding the keys as she lets out gospel paroxysms before heading back for the phrase. It feels like a mass call-to-arms, a command for perseverance, the encouragement of someone who has seen enough to know that the best you can do is to lift every voice and sing. On the sidelines, Lions safety Miles Killebrew raises his closed right fist, pumps it, and then screams.
Franklin died less than two years later, and this was the final time she would perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” in public. It was musically free and brave, an end-to-end improvisation in front of a couchbound country at the precipice of crisis. It was politically free and brave, too, the final testimony of someone who knew enough to know what was still worth fighting for, no matter the bad news that would never fully disappear.
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