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From Stevie Wonder to The Roots, the Obama Presidential Center’s grand opening concert was a decade in the making and worth every minute of the wait.
By: Kimberly Wilson
The South Side of Chicago has always known how to show out.
But on June 18, when the Obama Presidential Center officially opened its doors on the city’s historic Jackson Park campus, the neighborhood proved once again that when it comes to celebrating its own, nobody does it quite like home.
Now if you’ve followed Barack Obama over the years then you shouldn’t be surprised by the caliber of the musical lineup. The man has always known ball when it comes to music. Since 2015, he’s dropped a summer playlist every year that reminds everybody he didn’t just listen to music for the optics, the man genuinely has taste. So when the guest list for the opening ceremony dropped, it was essentially a greatest hits of everybody who has ever earned a spot in Obama’s rotation. Tems, who has landed on his playlists multiple times, was there. Marc Anthony, whose music Obama included on his official 2013 inauguration playlist, performed “Vivir Mi Vida.” And Common, a fellow South Sider who has had a decades-long relationship with the former president going back to a 2011 White House performance, took the stage alongside John Legend for a rendition of their Oscar-winning song “Glory.”
Before the program formally began, The Roots had already blessed the pre-ceremony crowd with Donald Byrd’s “Change (Makes You Want to Hustle),” Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” and Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” which is to say the South Side was already in full celebration mode before Barack Obama even step foot on that stage. Earlier in the program, John Legend performed Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll All Be Free.” After his set, Legend told the crowd that the first time he met Obama was nearly 20 years ago, when the former president was still a senator from Illinois. “We were so grateful to be a part of this entire journey from the beginning, so grateful to see this beautiful facility here, honoring all the work that the Obamas did, but that all of us did together,” Legend said.
Jennifer Hudson opened with the national anthem and followed it with “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” from Man of La Mancha, and by the time she finished, the crowd already knew what kind of afternoon this was going to be.
Bruce Springsteen followed with an acoustic “Land of Hope and Dreams.” U2’s Bono and The Edge played “City of Blinding Lights,” which is the song that echoed through Obama’s campaign rallies for years. Christina Aguilera, Marc Anthony, and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, who wrote “Better Believe” from scratch for the occasion, rounded out the program before Stevie Wonder closed it down.
Wonder, one of the greatest living musicians by nearly any measure, performed “All I Do” and then “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” which is the song that became the anthem for two presidential campaigns, and the Obamas danced to it on stage. Before the finale, Wonder told the crowd about the moment he first met Obama and what he saw in him. “I said, ‘In my spirit, I know that you’re running to be senator, but I’m seeing you as being a president.’ I said, ‘Let’s pray on it.’ And so we prayed on it,” he recalled. He left the crowd with a charge: “I want you to remember, all of you, never let fear put your dreams to sleep.” Then he called every performer back to the stage for “Higher Ground.”
The $850 million, 19-acre campus is the first fully digital presidential library in the country, and it opened to the public on Juneteenth, with museum tickets already sold out months in advance. Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, had promised the ceremony would be “unlike any other, filled with music, performances, and hope.”
Ten years in the making, one afternoon on John Lewis Plaza, and if you were there, you already know.