The home of the brave

The textbook year for divisiveness in America that’s always cited is 1968: Vietnam, race riots, the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and on and on. Here today, it’s only February yet 2026 is shaping up as possibly one of the most brutal and contentious in U.S. history.

The Super Bowl should be apolitical, but it seldom is and this year’s halftime entertainment has right-wingers jumping down a Bad Bunny-hole. Ironically, in 1968 another Puerto Rican-born singer pissed off a different generation of conservatives during a sporting event.

In 1968, Jose Feliciano’s jazzy, folky take on Light My Fire went to #3 nationally, winning him Grammies for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal and Best New Artist. Choosing Feliciano to sing the national anthem before the fifth game of the 1968 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals seemed like a safe bet.

Sitting on a stool in the infield with his guide dog lying next to him, Feliciano shed the bombast usually associated with the anthem, slowed it down and reshaped it much as he did with Light My Fire.

Conservatism in 1968 meant you were likely a member of the “silent majority,” took a hawkish view of Vietnam and, according to public opinion polls “found the antiwar movement, particularly its radical and ‘hippie’ elements, more obnoxious than the war itself.” Chances are, if you were male you served in the military at some point. 

So with that mindset, here’s this singer with long hair, who doesn’t even have the decency to remove his sunglasses and with a foreign name fooling around with the national anthem. People freaked out and without the instant, anonymous feedback of social media, there were angry calls to NBC and letters to the editor for weeks afterwards. One example: “I have never heard anything so disgraceful or disrespectful.”

“When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot,” Feliciano said in 2018. “I was trying to be a grateful patriot. I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.”

Earlier in the series, the anthem was sung, predictably and colorlessly, by 1950s pop singer Margaret Whiting and Marvin Gaye, whose version is straightforward (at a time when Berry Gordy was looking to move his Motown acts deeper into the world of white entertainment and before Marvin’s soul got psychedelicized). “I was very disappointed that Gaye didn’t do his own thing,” said Feliciano later. “Gaye chose to follow the old, safe path. He had a wonderful opportunity to say something for his people.”

Gaye made up for it in 1983 before the NBA All-Star Game with a version that, just as Feliciano did reshaping the anthem in the same manner that he reinterpreted Light My Fire, turned The Star-Spangled Banner into Sexual Healing.

Released as a single, Feliciano’s version of the anthem went to #50. He's also performed it at naturalization ceremonies welcoming new immigrants to America.