Brooks earns Gershwin Prize and puts on a show
Garth Brooks: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song Sunday, PBS
WASHINGTON Truly, it was an onlyin-D.C. moment: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D -Calif., and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., rocking out — there is no other way to describe it — as country musician Garth Brooks led a wildly enthusiastic singalong of Friends in Low Places. A few feet away, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who had been on Fox News criticizing Pelosi over the coronavirus spending bill, filmed the performance on his phone.
But that’s the thing about Brooks — he just brings people together. It’s one reason he was chosen to receive the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, which was presented during a tribute concert at DAR Constitution Hall, in a program to air Sunday on PBS. When accepting the award, even Brooks appeared to recognize the bizarreness of the bipartisan scene at this particular moment in history.
“Boy, if this offends you, I don’t mean it to,” Brooks told the audience. “But I never thought I would see unity like this in this crowd right here.” He then asked everyone to hold a moment of silence for the victims of the recent Tennessee tornadoes, and they did.
Brooks, 58, is the youngest recipient of the prize, a lifetime achievement award for singer-songwriters whose music made a lasting impact — it was created in 2007 and has been given to artists including Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson and Emilio and Gloria Estefan.
As the top-selling solo artist of all time, Brooks is often credited for launching country music from a niche genre to a mainstream global phenomenon when his popularity exploded in the 1990s.
“His originality, his artistry, his humanity, and let’s face it, relentless energy, certainly make him deserving of this high honour,” Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, said onstage.
Brooks opened the concert with the same level of enthusiasm he exudes at his stadium shows with the high-speed Ain’t Goin’ Down (’Til the Sun Comes Up), accompanied by Keith Urban. At the end of the evening, Brooks returned to the stage for a nearly hour-long set as he played songs from artists who inspired him when he was younger: Don McLean, Merle Haggard, Bill Withers and Bob Seger.
In between Brooks’s performances, his friends from Nashville showed up to honour his hit-filled catalogue. Among them: Urban joined the Howard University Chorale for a stirring rendition of We Shall Be Free; and Trisha Yearwood, Brooks’s wife of 15 years, brought down the house with The Change — and brought Brooks to tears with For the Last Time.
“That was not easy,” Yearwood said of singing For the Last Time while looking directly at her husband. The couple co-wrote the ballad, which is the story of their relationship: “I never thought forever would ever be for me, I could only guess that happiness wasn’t meant to be/But now both are mine — for the first time, I’m in love for the last time.”
Brooks also made it clear the award was deeply meaningful.
“Now my name joins the likes of some of the greatest names in music history,” he said, adding that his goal is to live his life in a way that, when it’s over, “People look at this list of names — and mine, hopefully, is not a surprise.”
The Washington Post