How Jimmy Carter became the Rock’n’Roll President

On Saturday, 4 May 1974, Jimmy Carter took the stage at the University of Georgia School of Law to address an audience that included lawyers, journalists and the Democratic Party luminary Ted Kennedy. At the time, Carter was governor of Georgia but could not run for reelection, so was starting to mull a longshot bid to become the next President of the United States. He used his speech to tear into the justice system in his own state and other parts of the country, arguing bluntly that it favored the rich and powerful at the expense of everybody else. Carter explained he got his understanding of justice from two sources. One was the work of the American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. “The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan,” said Carter. “After listening to his records about ‘The Ballad of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Times, They Are a-Changing,’ I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.”

Half a century before Kamala Harris embraced “brat summer”, it was pretty unusual for a prospective American president to align themselves with a musician in such a prominent way. Yet Carter – who died at the age of 100 on Sunday (29 December) – wasn’t shy about declaring how much he’d learned about American society by listening to Dylan records. “I grew up as a landowner’s son,” he continued. “But I don’t think I ever realised the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record, ‘I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.’”

While Carter’s forthright declaration of love for rock’n’roll would have surprised the veteran lawyers listening on, it caught the ear of a younger generation. One of the journalists present that day was Hunter S Thompson, reporting for Rolling Stone. He was supposed to be covering Ted Kennedy’s run for President, but wrote later that as soon as he heard Carter mention Dylan he fetched his tape recorder. “It was a king hell bastard of a speech,” wrote Thompson, “and by the time it was over he had rung every bell in the room.” In December of that year, Carter officially announced his run for the presidency and he was swept to office two years later.

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During his time in the White House, Carter’s consistent embrace of folk, gospel, blues, soul, jazz and rock earned him a reputation as the “Rock’n’Roll President”. The phrase was used as the title for a 2020 documentary about his political career, which featured interviews with a host of stars including Paul Simon, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Buffett and Dylan himself. In the film, Dylan said that hearing Carter quote his lyrics was the first time he realised his songs had reached the political establishment, but that Carter’s sincere appreciation of the lyrics set him at ease. Asked to define Carter, Dylan ended up paraphrasing the words of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1973 rock epic “Simple Man”. “I think of him as a simple kind of man, like in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song,” said Dylan. “He takes his time, doesn’t live too fast. Troubles come, but they will pass. Find the woman, and find love, and don’t forget there’s always someone above. There’s many sides to him. He’s a nuclear engineer. Woodworking carpenter. He’s also a poet. He’s a dirt farmer. If you told me he was a race car driver, I wouldn’t even be surprised.”

It was Dylan who, unbeknownst to him, kickstarted Carter’s long and important association with the great Southern rock band The Allman Brothers. In January 1974, Carter attended a Dylan concert in Atlanta and then afterward hosted a reception at the Governor’s Mansion. Gregg Allman showed up, and he and Carter ended up staying up late into the night listening to blues records by Elmore James. It was the start of a productive friendship and an alliance with the brothers’s label Capricorn Records that resulted in fundraising concerts that kickstarted Carter’s run for the presidency. “The Allman Brothers helped put me in the White House by raising money when I didn’t have any money,” Carter recalled later.

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After he made it to Washington DC, Carter continued to promote and associate with the musicians he loved. Aretha Franklin sang “God Bless America” at a presidential inauguration event for Carter in 1977. The following year, he hosted an all-star jazz concert on the south lawn of the White House during which he joined Dizzy Gillespie to deliver the two-word chorus of “Salt Peanuts”. In 1980, after performing for Carter in the Rose Garden, country singer Willie Nelson famously smoked a joint while sitting on the roof of the White House. “Sitting on the roof of the White House in Washington, DC, late at night with a beer in one hand and a fat Austin Torpedo in the other, I drifted into a reflective mood,” Nelson wrote in his autobiography. “Nobody from the Secret Service was watching us – or if they were, it was with the intention of keeping us out of trouble instead of getting us into it.” It was later revealed that it was Carter’s son Chip “sharing a number” with Nelson that night, but it should be noted that Carter himself wasn’t present. “President Carter knew nothing about this and would not have condoned it,” Nelson clarified.

Carter’s embrace of rock’n’roll – and rock’n’roll musicians – helped put him in the spotlight on the national stage and their fundraising was crucial in enabling him to raise the money to stay there, but the relationship was never mercenary or calculated. Jimmy Carter was a Southerner who grew up relatively privileged in an era of deep division and racial segregation, listening to gospel, blues and jazz that spoke to the world he saw around him, lamented its wrongs and promised a vision of abetter world. He understood deep in his bones that music could help bring a divided nation together.