Originally Posted by
RanRan79
Who? I just had to look up who this person was and she was not a megastar. The following is from the ESPN article that Khan quotes from earlier in the thread. It gives context into how different a choice Diana Ross was from those who were brought on before, and includes a reference to Helen O'Connell as well:
For the first, um, XV years of the Super Bowl, the performance of the national anthem was mostly something of a community effort, left to marching bands and local choirs, a beauty pageant winner and the kind of jazz trumpet players who are beloved by squares. The national anthem wasn’t played at Super Bowl XI, and even after the NFL hired Jim Steeg to fashion the Super Bowl into a spectacle commensurate with the nation’s-- and the league’s -- sense of exceptionalism, the bookings could be casually arranged. Why did Cheryl Ladd, the replacement Charlie’s Angel, sing the anthem for Super Bowl XIV? “Pete Rozelle ran into her at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel -- that’s how she was booked,” Steeg says. Why did grandmotherly Helen O’Connell warble the anthem a year later? Rozelle’s second-in-command “was in love with Helen O’Connell from the big-band era in the ‘40s.”
It was Steeg’s idea to hire a pop star for Super Bowl XVI. “The game was in Detroit, and I told Pete, ’There’s only one person who can sing the national anthem in Detroit.’ He said, ’Go ahead, kid -- go do it.’ So we got Diana Ross, and she represented a change in everything we were doing. All of a sudden, you had star power.”
Ross sang it a cappella in front of 81,000 people at the Silverdome. She never had a big voice, and as the first icon who had to figure out how to strike a balance with all that iconography, she was the last Super Bowl performer to ask the crowd for help-- to say “Sing with me!” And they did; the players did, the coaches did, the fans in the nosebleed seats did, and their gathered voices, when you listen to them today on YouTube, sound not just like a rough chorus accompanying Diana Ross but like the echo of another age.
End of quote. I love when the people involved talk about this kind of stuff. If he says Diana was the first, anything being said to the contrary is a lie.
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