The joke is on him, I guess... Today,
Chris Stapleton appeared as a guest on Howard Stern’s
SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show , where he discussed his
friendship with Willie Nelson , learning to play guitar, and of course, his iconic Super Bowl performance last year. It was highly and widely praised as one of the best National Anthem performances of all-time, and Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni AND offensive lineman Jason Kelce cryied while performing the song, which says all you need to know, really. Obviously, it's a huge honor for anyone to get that gig, but plenty of artists turn down the National Anthem at any event because it's so easy to mess up and hard to sing, which unless you have a voice like Chris (and obviously most don't), that's probably smart. Stern asked Chris if he was nervous to do it, and Stapleton said that he practiced many times ahead of the big game:
"Playing the National Anthem period, is a dangerous thing. Just like throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game. You can really mess that up if you don't go throw a few pitches before you do it... I like pressure in ways that it can make me focus a little bit but... I went over this song a lot for that moment." And the funny thing is, Chris used to say he wouldn't play the National Anthem until he played the Super Bowl as a joke... so when the opportunity finally came, he said yes immediately. Actually, the NFL had offered it to him before, but there was a bit of a mix up and he had to wait for a different year to do it:
"The joke for me for the longest time was, people would ask me to play the National Anthem... I'd be like, no, I'll just play it on the Super Bowl. And that was kind of my joke, because I didn't think that would be something someone would ask me to do. And oddly enough, it wasn't the first time they had asked me to do it. There was a year, and I forget which year it was, they had asked me to do it but it turned out someone else in the NFL organization had asked somebody else to do it first, and I said 'Yeah, I'll do that.' And then they came back and they're like, 'Well, sorry, we want to change you to not this year.' I was like, 'Oh, woah, woah, woah.' When the opportunity came to do it for real, yeah, I said yes immediately. " Little did he know, because Stapleton is always so humble, it would become one of the best of all time, right up there with the great Whitney Houston... that's pretty damn amazing. And he actually had no idea players and coaches were crying until he say footage from the TV broadcast, and he credits producers with turning "the volume up" and making it an extra special moment for everyone watching at home, too:
"No idea. The editing that was done in that moment, in that TV moment, all the shots, everything that was happening and how thy were catching it, and the order in which they were doing it, whoever was calling all those shots really tuned the volume up on that moment, you know? And I'm very proud that I got to do that, and I'm proud of that moment." I'm sure glad it turned out not to be a joke after all... this never, ever gets old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcs6HLKz_aQ&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whiskeyriff.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE Here's that part of the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz6yc_G4_YM
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