Feliciano recalls anthem backlash
Tuesday night, Boston native James Taylor will walk out onto the field at Fenway Park before Game 1 of the 2018 World Series and sing the national anthem, two minutes of Americana that have driven a four-stanza’d wedge into this country since Colin Kaepernick first sat, then took a knee during the song in protest of police brutality in August of 2016.
50 years ago, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were kicked out of the Mexico City Olympics for raising black power fists in the air during the Star Spangled Banner to bring awareness to the mistreatment of blacks back home. The two track stars were vilified for their actions.
But nine days before Smith and Carlos, Jose Feliciano, a blind Puerto Rican American, took the field at Tigers Stadium — invited by legendary Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell — to sing the anthem before Game 5 of the World Series between the Tigers and Cardinals. He was about to do something that had never been done before, sparking outrage across the country.
And no one knew it was coming.
Before that day, the anthem was known for being one of the more difficult songs to sing with extreme highs and lows, and it was known for something else, as well. It was always the same. But not on October 7, 1968. On that day, Feliciano, with just his guitar, put his own “feeling” into the song, creating a rendition that had never been heard before.
Back in 1968, Jose Feliciano was on the come-up. His album “Feliciano!” was dominating the American pop charts and at the Grammys that year he took home two, one for Best New Artist and the other for Best Pop Song. Things couldn’t have been better for the young singer and songwriter.
That was until he took the field in front of the entire country, a country fighting a controversial war in Vietnam and still reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. He was just 23 years old. “I didn’t change the melody or anything like that. I just didn’t sing it in the plain way that it was written,” said Feliciano on the eve of Game 1 of the 2018 Word Series. “I put myself into it. My whole soul. Who I am. You know it’s a funny thing because when I did it, I didn’t realize some of the things I’m telling you now. I’ve been listening to it so much. That I finally realized is all I did really was try to put some feeling into an otherwise cold anthem. Really? For a country like ours? Come on, you’ve got to have the best. So I gave it my best.”
The backlash was immediate. Feliciano was booed off the field, and that was just the beginning. Radio stations stopped playing his music as the outrage grew.
“That was a tough road to cross,” said Feliciano. “When people don’t hear you on the radio they think ‘maybe he retired.’ It hurt me for a while...When I did it I never thought it was cause all the commotion it did.
“I didn’t mean for it to cause such a furor, but I was the first guy to ever do the national anthem with a guitar,” said Feliciano.
Feliciano’s career went into a tailspin. He says it wasn’t until the show “Chico and the Man” became a hit on television that things started to turn around. He wrote the music for the popular show starring Freddie Prinze and Jack Albertson that debuted in 1974.
“That kind of saved me,” said Feliciano.
Fifty years later, Feliciano still doesn’t understand why his performance drew so much ire.
“Maybe they were thinking to themselves, ‘who’s this hippie singing with a guitar.’ Who knows what they were thinking,” said Feliciano. “They were all wrong, I know that for sure... Time heals all wounds. I can live with it.”