In March 1995, singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow accompanied First Lady Hillary Clinton to war-torn Bosnia. Crow was relatively new to the popular music scene at the time, her debut album less than two years old. But the album was a hit, and it earned her an invitation to tour with the USO.
The trip deeply affected her.
“I really experienced something I’d never seen before, which was what it looks like to be in a war-torn area and meet people who had suffered through that,” said Crow in a 2014 Rolling Stone Country interview. “Part of [Clinton’s] goal was to speak to the women and children in those villages. The moment we went into Bosnia, the whole genocide was happening in Rwanda and we sat back and watched it. Yet Bosnia seemed to be kind of a stronghold in Europe and we needed the military presence there. I came home really struck by the question of why we invest in some countries, and other countries we don’t.”
Upon returning home, Crow poured her feelings into music, wrote “Redemption Day,” and recorded it for her sophomore album, Sheryl Crow.
The album spawned three hit singles, but “Redemption Day” wasn’t one of them. It was never even released as a single, but it still found an audience, including one person in particular for whom the song seemed tailor-made.
Musically, “Redemption Day” sounds like a Johnny Cash song, so it was fitting that Cash decided to record a cover of it in 2003 as one of his last projects before his death.
“Having Johnny Cash record one of my songs was my biggest accomplishment as a songwriter,” Crow told Southern Living magazine. “Afterward, he called me and asked if I liked his version and quizzed me about why I wrote ‘Redemption Day.’ But we never got to sing it together. He died three months later.”
In 2019, Crow recorded yet a third version of the song, this one a blend of her new vocals (and piano) with Cash’s previously recorded vocals, and released it that April.
So when Crow was announced as part of the roster for that year’s Stand Up for Heroes event six months later, it was a pretty good bet that “Redemption Day” would be one of the songs she would perform.
What no one could have predicted is that she’d perform it as a duet with Bruce Springsteen in their first and only performance together to date.
Sheryl and Bruce traded lead vocals in their intimate acoustic performance, immediately establishing the evening’s first musical performance as the highlight of the event. Their duet may have been a one-time-only affair, but “Redemption Day” is just as relevant today as when Crow wrote it.
Redemption Day
First performed: November 4, 2019 (New York City, NY)
Last performed: November 4, 2019 (New York City, NY)
