One of the great country performances of the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.
Eric Church performed The Star-Spangled Banner as a duet with R&B singer Jazmine Sullivan at Super Bowl LV on February 7, 2021 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. It was during the COVID pandemic, and Eric has said before that the 2021 Capitol riot also prompted him to want to do it.
Singing the Anthem is always a risk, especially at an event as massive as the Super Bowl, because if you screw it up you’ll likely never live it down, and considering this was a duet, it only heightened the stakes to get it just right as Church and Sullivan blended two different genres in the country’s most iconic song. That’s hard enough to do as it is, let alone with the Anthem, and they ended up delivering a soulful and really beautiful rendition, and while really no country artist can compare to Chris Stapleton’s version, Eric did a great job during what was a very challenging time for the country.
And he explained on the Hometown Titans podcast with Taylor Zarzour that he really wanted to stress a message of unity while performing with Sullivan, and they knew it was a massive opportunity to bring the country together considering the Super Bowl is the biggest event of the year:
“That was a weird time. But it was also a good time, at least for doing that, because the country didn’t… the Super Bowl was still the thing the country was gonna watch when we did not know what was happening anywhere else. And I knew that.
The way we crafted the performance, and the way we tried to do it was make it a unifying thing of, I don’t know where we’re gonna go, but we’re gonna go there together, and it’s gonna be okay.”
He also says he thinks Nashville will get the chance to host a Super Bowl in the not-too-distant future, and I completely agree… maybe we’ll finally get another country halftime show if and when that time comes, too:
“I feel very comfortable that… and a lot of it comes down to, if you look at what makes great Super Bowls and great Super Bowl cities, Nashville checks every box. What they’ve been waiting on is enough of the growth that you had the hotels and you had the infrastructure to support it, right? Getting the Super Bowl, or Final Four, or college football playoff, that’s a big, big thing for a city.
And Nashville has proven over the last few years with the growth, and how they handled just a weekend. I mean, it’s lit when the Predators are playing… they’ve shown that there’s a big appetite for it, and they’ve shown there’s infrastructure for it.”
It’s been speculated that 2030 is the year for Music City, but we’ll have to wait and see on an official announcement because tons of cities bid on getting to host the Super Bowl every year and Nashville has never done it before.
I feel like Eric’s halftime often gets glossed over when we talk about great country performances that have occurred in relation to the Super Bowl, mostly because Stapleton delivered such an iconic performance just a couple years after Eric in 2023, but Eric’s duet with Jazmine has aged so well and they really met the moment in a powerful way.
Check it out:
The full podcast is available below.
