East Room
7:40 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Everybody, please have a seat. And give it up for our musical director, Booker T. — (applause) — and the Memphis Soul All-Stars. (Applause.) I just want everybody to know that it is now my second term, so rather than “Hail to the Chief,” we're going with that from here on out. (Laughter and applause.) Little change in tradition.
Now, before we get started, I am going to exercise some presidential prerogative to say a few words about two very special people who are here tonight — this will humiliate them, but I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway. Jess Wright and Kenny Thompson both work on my staff — crucial members of my team since way back in Iowa in 2007.
Over the weekend, Kenny popped the question and Jess said yes. (Applause.) So I want to congratulate — publicly — Kenny Thompson and Jess Wright. A beautiful couple. (Applause.) We love them. They are wonderful. They've been loyal, shown such great friendship to me, and I'm so glad that they have gone ahead and taken the plunge.
By the way, guys, Justin Timberlake just got married to this lovely young lady right here, Jessica Biel. (Applause.) So Justin can probably offer you a few pointers. And, Justin, they are looking for a wedding singer. (Laughter.) I'm just saying.
Tonight, I am speaking not just as a President, but as one of America’s best-known Al Green impersonators. (Laughter.) So I have a new appreciation for what Al once said about the Memphis Soul sound that he helped create — “We don’t even know ourselves how that music has endured for so long and how that came out of us.”
All I know is I’ve been looking forward to tonight because, let’s face it, who does not love this music? (Applause.) These songs get us on the dance floor. Even the governor of Tennessee said he's going to dance tonight. (Laughter.) They get stuck in our heads. We go back over them again and again. And they’ve played an important part in our history.
In the sixties and seventies, Memphis knew its share of division and discord and injustice. But in that turbulent time, the sound of Hi, and Duke, and Sun, and Stax Records tried to bridge those divides — to create a little harmony with harmony. The great Memphis musician Don Nix went to an all-white school, and he described what it was like. He said, “If you could imagine, nobody’s ever heard R&B music before. White kids had never heard it. And you can imagine what that did to us.”
So he and others kept playing music that everybody could get into. They created a whole new sound, and as they did, they broke down barriers. On …read more