Best Super Bowl National Anthems
 

Hard to top Whitney in 1991.

But after that, my vote for the top 3 are (in no particular order):

Chris Stapleton 2023
Faith Hill 2000
Jennifer Hudson 2009

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/s...lady-gaga/amp/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WFKXJ091Ed4

I don't recall the performance, but I cannot abide Faith Hill. I am still traumatized by listening to her ruin the great Joplin song Piece of My Heart. Even my son who never has anything bad to say about anyone made a face when I asked him what he thought. Cringeworthy. Didn't Beyonce do it one year before she was a megastar?

There's Whitney in 1991, then everyone else. I can't even remember the others. All the others shrink away to insignificance. And hers came after the Roseann Barr fiasco. That one is noteworthy for how God awful horrendous it was.

Roseanne Barr wasn't at the Super Bowl fortunately.

Beyoncé did indeed perform -- 2004. That rendition is in the first link I sent. Objectively, I didn't think Beyoncé was as good as Faith Hill's.

Whitney has my vote for the best voice, male or female, in recorded history. (And she's from New Jersey.). So yeah, she's tough to beat.

Are you including jazz? Opera?

True, but Whitney's incredible version was most definitely in response to it.

Thought about it. Yep, I'll stick with Whitney.

Great voice of course, but for me behind Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Sarah Vaughan. On the pop side I would say Celine and Mariah are pretty close too. If we were making this "greatest singers" and not just "greatest voice" would have a much longer list.

Leontyne Price was Whitney's cousin, I think.

Once removed. Different generations. But yes.

Chris Stapleton moved the stadium in 2023. Upon further reflection, I think he's my pick for number 2 all time. Simple and classy, just as it should be.

My Leontyne Price story:

A friend and I were standing outside the Four Seasons in Boston waiting for some rock person. Leontyne Price walks out the front door and I tell my friend who she was. You could not miss her hair. We walked up to her and I asked her for an autograph. Her response - 'You want mine?'. Me - 'Well of course, I know who you are.' I guess she was surprised that two 20-30 something Caucasian guys wearing t-shirts and jeans knew who she was. She happened to be in town to receive an honorary degree from Berklee College of Music.

My wife (then GF) and I saw her at Symphony Hall in Boston in a solo concert in 1982 or so. Technically she may have been past her prime at that point, but she was still ethereal

By the way, she is now 97.

Smokey Robinson did an amazing rendition but I don't remember if it was Super Bowl or World Series. Started with God Bless America and transitioned into the Star Spangled Banner.

Even if we're sticking with popular music I'd take Aretha over anyone else ever, and she'd have to be in the running for greatest regardless of genre.

Did she have a great voice or was she a great singer? To me those are different things.

Well Pavarotti was so entranced by her performance stepping in to cover for him at the last second at the Grammies one year (where she performed HIS song) that when she explained she was terrified of flying and couldn't appear with him in Europe, he promised to fly with her and hold her hand the entire flight, if she would agree to come.

Pretty sure he knows better than me.

Interesting. An unlikely duo. La Scala meets Motown (well technically she did not sign with Motown but I think broadly speaking is part of the sound). I always thought her strength was her phrasing and timing and spirit, but maybe the great voice was there too.

Well to be fair Pavarotti enjoyed pop music and singers and performed with them a lot, but he tended to pick REALLY good ones.

He has two charity concerts that he put together called Romanian Angel Appeal, in addition to American pop stars there are lots of world stars that we don't know of, he performs duets with his favorites. You get to hear him duet in opera with Cheryl Crow and Jon Secada and pop with Eric Clapton and Elton John etc.

Two awesome albums. Probably available on youtube as well.

Domingo had a nice duet with John Denver, Perhaps Love. The Ezio Pinza Mary Martin duets in South Pacific are great.

Dumb thing, any time I see or hear the name Ezio Pinza I start singing his name to the tune of The Searches "Needles and Pins"

Uh.

In the spirit of this evolving post, I spent some time reviewing the tape of some of the operatic divas and divos mentioned above. Just in case I was missing something.

Nope, I still stand by Whitney.

Here's why:

1) From my layman's untrained ear, her voice has as much power and tone as the divas -- and probably more range. It is possible that a machine that scientifically measures these elements of sound could settle the debate empirically, but even so, I suspect it would be close, even if she doesn't win outright.

2) But music isn't meant to be empirically measured by a sound-analyzing machine. Music has always been part of a social context.

Whitney's voice resonated with millions and millions of regular people. The type of people who watch the Super Bowl on TV and go to baseball games with their kids. When America needed someone in 1991 to perform a wartime anthem at the SB -- notably (and this has been documented) after Roseanne's disgraceful (George HW Bush's own words) performance, we called on Whitney -- and she delivered. She's the voice of probably two American generations.

And even today, if you played any one of her signature songs in any given bar in the developed world, I'll bet more people than not can identify her voice.

Not to take anything at all away from Whitney but I doubt she had Sarah Vaughan's range which was said to be close to 5 octaves. indeed, I just looked it up, Whitney was around 3, which is still very impressive.

Try it, it's fun.

The "uh" was a reference to the lyric. Needles and pins, uh.

That's what makes it work lol.

I've seen sources where Whitney is 5 octaves; others where she is between 3 and 4. You know who else is 5 octaves? Axl Rose. Not sure many would put him in the pantheon of great voices.

The best voice isn't someone who can bellow the loudest, with the broadest range, and in key -- though my point before was that even if it were, Whitney probably scores pretty high on all 3 fronts. It's more about how her voice connects with the audience.

The genre certainly wasn't for everyone, and her range probably wasn't much, but Karen Carpenter had a really good and distinctive voice IMO.