The Tony Award-winning singer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” will performed before the Super Bowl LVII game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. She is most known for her role as Abbott Elementary. She’ll be OK, judging on the response she received everywhere she went during Super Bowl week in Phoenix.
“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 supporting the Eagles, who she will support on Sunday after her performance at the State Farm Stadium 40-yard line.
“How could I not? The location of Abbott Elementary is Philadelphia. Senator Hughes, my husband, represents the district as senator,” Ralph continued. “You know I support the Eagles,” I said.
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Vincent Hughes, a state senator whose district includes Montgomery County and parts of Philadelphia, is Ralph’s husband.
“Of course, my favorite line is ‘Till victory is won,’” she told reporters while pointing at her Eagles “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.”handbag, which she noted was a “Philly thing” before tossing out a melodic “Fly, Eagles, Fly.”
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.”
