While many famous singers—Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Elton John—have rejected offers to perform at Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration, one performer is mulling over the prospect—with one caveat.
Rebecca Ferguson, the British X Factor runner-up, has said in a statement released via Twitter that she’s been asked to perform at the upcoming inauguration. Ferguson responded, however, by saying that she’ll only do it if she’s allowed to perform “Strange Fruit,” a haunting song about racism and lynching in America. Billie Holiday famously recorded a particularly moving version of it in 1939.
On Twitter, Ferguson hailed the number for its “huge historical importance,” calling it “a song that was blacklisted in the United States for being too controversial. A song that speaks to all the disregarded and down trodden black people in the United States. A song that is a reminder of how love is the only thing that will conquer all the hatred in this world, then I will graciously accept your invitation and see you in Washington.”
She
The singer is no stranger to Holiday’s work. Ferguson‘s third album, Lady Sings the Blues, released in 2015, was a collection of Holiday covers. Ferguson is also no stranger to performing songs with a social message: in her first X Factor audition in 2010, she performed Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a classic about racial injustice in America.
Later, during her run on the program, Ferguson sang “Feeling Good”—a jazzy number famously recorded by Nina Simone, another singer with an activist bent who surely would have had a thing or two to say about this election cycle.
Representatives for Ferguson say the inauguration committee approached her, and that the conversations reached a draft contract stage. Representatives for the inauguration committee have not yet responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.
Ferguson’s statement is one of the latest updates in a sea of inauguration news. Thus far, the performers slated for the inauguration include 16-year-old opera singer and America’s Got Talent runner-up Jackie Evancho, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and the Rockettes—with the latter choice stoking up tons of unwanted drama within the iconic dance group.
