It’s not clear whether the show will be broadcast beyond the live performance, though eager viewers can tune in to hear the president's remarks.
WASHINGTON — Elton John was all in on a plan to perform at the White House before the world-famous rockin’ piano player hangs it up — he says — John was swinging by the South Lawn on Friday night for a show he’s calling “A Night When Hope and History Rhyme,” a reference to a poem by Irishman Seamus Heaney that President Joe Biden often quotes.
A giant open-air tent and stage were set up on the White House lawn for the show,. The 2,000-person guest list includes teachers, nurses, frontline workers and LGBTQ advocates, plus civil rights advocate Ruby Bridges and Jeanne White-Ginder, an AIDS activist and mother of Ryan White, who died from AIDs-related complications in 1990.
It’s not clear whether the show will be broadcast beyond the live performance, though eager viewers can tune into the White House livestream to catch the president’s remarks, at least. John has worked with A+E in the past on his global HIV/AIDS charity, the Elton John Foundation, which has raised more than $525 million to combat the virus around the world.
The president and first lady are big fans. Biden wrote in a 2017 memoir about singing “Crocodile Rock” to his two young boys as he drove them to school, and again later to son Beau before he died of cancer at age 46.