‘Abbott Elementary’ star Sheryl Lee Ralph ready for her Super Bowl spotlight
"We are watching the Sheryl Lee Ralph show,” R&B legend Babyface told reporters during Super Bowl week.
PHOENIX — Sheryl Lee Ralph is ready for the Super Bowl spotlight.
The Emmy Award-winning Abbott Elementary star and Tony Award winner will sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” ahead of kickoff at Super Bowl LVII between the Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs. Judging by the reception everywhere she showed up during Super Bowl week in Phoenix, she’ll do just fine.
“We are watching the Sheryl Lee Ralph show,” R&B legend Babyface said during a media event earlier this week. He will sing “America the Beautiful,” while country music star Chris Stapleton will perform “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Naturally, Ralph spent the week pushing the Eagles, who she’ll be rooting for Sunday following her performance from the 40-yard line at State Farm Stadium.
“How can I not? Abbott Elementary takes place in Philadelphia. My husband, Senator Hughes, is the senator for the district,” Ralph added. “You know I’m rooting for the Eagles.”
Ralph’s husband is State Sen. Vincent Hughes, whose district covers parts of Philadelphia and Montgomery County.
“Of course, my favorite line is ‘Till victory is won,’” she told reporters while pointing at her Eagles handbag, which she noted was a “Philly thing” before tossing out a melodic “Fly, Eagles, Fly.”
Here’s everything you need to know about “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and its addition to the Super Bowl lineup:
The history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
Often referred to as “the Black national anthem,” the song was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP’s first Black executive secretary. Johnson and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, transposed it into a song that was first performed by a student choir at a segregated school in Jacksonville, Fla., on Feb. 12, 1900, to celebrate the birthday of former President Abraham Lincoln, according to the NAACP.
“Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds,” James wrote in 1935. “But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. ... The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.”
The song was adopted by the NAACP as the Negro national anthem in 1919, 12 years before the nation adopted “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem. It became an important part of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, sung during organizational meetings for the Montgomery Bus Boycott and quoted in speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., according to Time magazine.
“As a child attending Jefferson Elementary School in the Trenton, N.J., public school system, the song was part of our morning ritual,” said Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations and a former Eagles defender. “We sang along with it right before placing our hands over our hearts and pledging allegiance to the American flag.”
» READ MORE: Fox’s Kevin Burkhardt grew up an Eagles fan. Now he’s calling a Birds Super Bowl
The song has become part of the Super Bowl pregame
Ralph will only be the third performer to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Super Bowl, which the NFL added to its pregame show during the 2020 season, following racial unrest in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Alicia Keys performed a prerecorded version of the song ahead of Super Bowl LV in 2021, narrated by actor Anthony Mackie. Last year, it was brought to life for the big game by five-time Grammy Award-winning gospel duo Mary Mary, who were accompanied by the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles outside of SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
Now it’s Ralph’s turn. She told reporters last week the offer to perform the song came out the blue, and she is “absolutely thrilled” to take the field and share it with the millions of viewers watching from home.
“To me, it shows a major effort by the NFL to be truly inclusive, to say, ‘We’re going to represent all people,’” Ralph said.