(December 29, 2024). There was kind of a groovy side to former president Jimmy Carter…a side that his peanut-farming, country boy image overshadowed during much of the time he spent in the public’s consciousness.
Sure, there was also the side that had to be very presidential and tackle some of the nation’s most difficult problems during his White House tenure, including an energy crisis, looming economic recession, an Iranian hostage crisis, and a general uneasiness around the country that ultimately led to his ouster after one term.
But there was also a cool side, one that embraced rock and roll, championed Black music, and favored a decreasingly popular but still-clean energy source — nuclear power — not in a political sense (like so many elected officials do when it’s convenient or unavoidable), but because he had first-hand experience with it.
It’s that hipster side of the nation’s 39th president that this blogger appreciates and is celebrating with this tribute, because both entities — music and nuclear safety — have been personal passions for decades, and because arguably no other president has done more for either one than Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter reigned over a groovy music era
Carter — who died Sunday (December 29) at age 100 as the nation’s longest living leader — was the White House occupant during some of the best years of my musical upbringing (specifically from 1977-81), admittedly an association that’s more coincidence than anything either I or the president himself did.
Drawing anything more than a coincidental connection between Carter’s presidency and what this writer considers music’s greatest era would be the equivalent of giving subsequent presidents like Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama — arguably the least and most musically hip U.S. commanders-in-chief, respectively — credit for the history-shaping music that emerged during their administrations.
For instance, Mr. Obama could no more take credit for Adele’s 21, Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Taylor Swift’s 1989 (despite the musical aptitude demonstrated by his annual favorite-song playlists, which still generate buzz nearly eight years after his presidency ended) than Carter could for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall or the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
Similarly, Mr. Reagan had nothing to do with Thriller, Purple Rain or Born In The USA — all career-apexing albums released during his first term — although he did secure dubious connections to the musicians who made those landmark recordings during those first four years he was in office.
For instance, and I’m digressing slightly from the article’s main point here, readers may recall how Reagan, during one of his 1984 campaign speeches for re-election, co-opted patriotic intent into Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” despite the song more accurately depicting the downside of America’s unpopular war with Vietnam; or three years earlier when the then-first-year president was immortalized in a cautionary Cold War-era request by Prince in the song “Ronnie Talk To Russia,” from the 1981 album Controversy.
Reagan also famously invited Michael Jackson to the White House in May 1984 to accept a humanitarian award for his anti-violence Thriller song “Beat It,” during which the president made tongue-in-cheek references to several of the King of Pop’s earlier hits in an attempt to earn cool points.
Otherwise, the nation’s 40th president, by then 73 years young (by today’s standards), likely didn’t rank popular music among his highest priorities during the run-up to his second election later that year (although his campaign advisors and speech writers apparently saw the value in him invoking pop music culture).
But the man Reagan replaced in the White House, the peanut farmer-turned politician named Jimmy Carter, not only knew music but arguably owed his unlikely presidency to rock and roll, particularly the rock musicians whose alliance with the relatively unknown Georgia native helped him win just enough votes to oust incumbent president Gerald Ford in 1976.
Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President
Because of the grass-roots efforts of big rock-and-roll names like Greg Allman (of the Allman Brothers Band), Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and others, and because of Carter’s ability to relate to these musicians, he went from being an obscure, local Georgia farmer and politician to a seemingly cool, national public figure — and became the answer for a country weary of Nixon-era policies and corruption — in less than two years.
This musical connection appeared natural for Carter who was raised in the rural, predominantly Black area of Plains, GA and who was exposed to blues, soul and gospel music at an early age.
He had a genuine appreciation for that music and later for rock and roll, an institution that itself was only 20 years old when the man better known for his Georgia drawl and for having colorful family members (like Brother Billy and mom Lillian) first announced his presidential candidacy in late 1974.
Related: Rock-and-Roll President: How musicians helped Jimmy Carter to the White House| The Guardian
Carter, who was 51 by early 1976, was not necessarily a part of the rock and roll generation. But he would be dubbed in a 2020 documentary as the nation’s “Rock and Roll President,” with plenty of evidence to back up that title.
According to the documentary, directed by Mary Wharton, Carter had befriended artists like CSN, Dylan, and Allman (he would even be seen wearing Allman Brothers Band t-shirts), and won them over with his independent-thinker and atypical-politician image. Even “outlaw country” artists like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash played a crucial role in getting Carter into the White House in 1976, the film argued.
By the time of his narrow election victory that November, in which he mainly carried states east of the Mississippi River and, with the exception of Virginia, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, plus Texas — outcomes that would be unlikely in today’s political landscape — many of the artists who’d stumped for Carter during his campaign, including legends Dylan, Allman and Cash, had already seen their career commercial peaks.
Yet it was considered a coup for a presidential candidate of any party to have had those musicians’ endorsement, especially when rockers had previously eschewed any (positive) association with politicians during music’s most countercultural period, particularly during the Vietnam War era.
As it turned out, rock and roll’s growing impact on politics was manifested in Carter’s victory, and politicians from then on would try to use the medium to their advantages (see the Reagan mentions above, plus prominent examples in Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the past and future president whose rallies are as notorious for the songs he plays as they are for what he says).
With Carter’s 1976 arrival came the reckoning that rock music in particular, which had been derided by many parents and politicians only a decade earlier, was now part of the mainstream.
Music’s growth fueled by blockbusters during the Carter years
It was during Carter’s single term in office that the recording industry saw major commercial growth — culminating with the industry’s first $4B-revenue year in 1978 — thanks to the evolution of FM radio, which overtook AM radio in listenership during Carter’s term, growing album-oriented radio formats, improved recording technology, and several blockbuster releases during that period by bands who were considered “corporate rock” entities.
Carter’s ascendancy coincided with the rise of several of these groups including Boston, Styx, Supertramp, Heart, Kansas, Foreigner, Journey, and Fleetwood Mac — all highly successful bands with slick, polished, FM radio-friendly sounds who were tied to major labels or distributors with deep promotional pockets.
The first of many blockbuster albums occurring on Carter’s watch — and one of the greatest albums of all time — happened when Fleetwood Mac released its landmark Rumours LP in February 1977 — just two weeks after the president’s inauguration. It matched the record for the longest-standing No. 1 studio album up to that time (31 non-consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard 200), culminating in January 1978 just as Carter’s first year in office ended.
Among its many accomplishments, Rumours was the first album in history to generate as many as four top ten singles — a record that stood for nearly six years (until Thriller broke it in 1983).
Rumours was ultimately replaced at the top by another blockbuster: the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, which knocked Fleetwood Mac’s opus out of No. 1 on the first day of Carter’s second year in office (January 21, 1978), and remained there for nearly six months, becoming the all-time biggest-selling soundtrack album (and the biggest seller of all until Thriller five years later).
The dates coinciding with Carter’s milestones are purely that — coincidental — but still symbolic. More blockbusters would follow in Carter’s era, including the soundtrack to the movie Grease, which would spend 11 weeks at the top and become the biggest selling soundtrack to a musical in the 20th century. The Urban Cowboy soundtrack in 1980 — Carter’s last full year as president — became the biggest-selling country music soundtrack in history and the first album of any genre to yield six top-40 singles on the Billboard pop chart (Thriller topped that, too, in 1984).
An outgrowth of the success of Saturday Night Fever was the explosion of disco in 1978 and ‘79, which had found its place among rock, adult contemporary and folksy singer/songwriter hits on top-40 radio playlists, as well as in clubs where the growing punk and new wave scenes were also thriving.
With soul, country and soft rock still in the mix, music’s diversity was arguably at an all-time high in the late 1970s.
Carter’s creation of Black Music Month coincides with disco’s backlash
While dance music’s popularity had predated SNF, the Bee Gees-infused soundtrack sparked a disco revolution that reached a fever pitch in 1979 during the heart of Carter’s presidency. By March of that year, nearly half the songs in the pop top 40 qualified as disco, most of them by Black musicians.
It was that saturation, partially fueled by some rock music stations’ conversion to disco formats in the late seventies, that led to one of America’s uglier moments during the decade.
On July 12, 1979, a mob of rock music fans descended on Chicago’s Comiskey Park for “Disco Demolition Night,” an event sponsored by an anti-disco radio DJ named Steve Dahl who’d encouraged listeners to attend a doubleheader game between the White Sox and Detroit Tigers to burn and explode disco records out of protest of the genre’s massive popularity.
While there were no known human casualties, the event did highlight a cultural clash between the mostly white male protesters and the people who primarily enjoyed disco, namely Blacks, Latinos and the gay community.
Just three days later, Jimmy Carter gave one of the most important televised talks of his presidency, known as his “crisis of confidence” speech, which addressed some of the country’s social issues.
There was no mention of “Disco Demolition Night,” for Carter had weightier issues to deal with, including the ongoing economic and energy crises and associated long gas lines, which had been the subject of their own protests that year.
In his crisis speech, however, in addition to imploring citizens to be more responsible in their use of electricity and gas in order to conserve energy and reduce our reliance on expensive foreign oil, the disappointed president gloomily cited a lack of “confidence and unity” amongst Americans, a growing sentiment as the country was becoming more divided, both politically and culturally.
While Carter, whose presidency was in turmoil at the time, didn’t address the anti-disco riot specifically in that July 1979 speech, he had made music front-and-center in a historic decision one month prior.
It was in June 1979 that Carter created Black Music Month, the first annual celebration of the historical and cultural significance of Black music and its creators in America.
In a speech given at the White House concert he hosted on June 7, 1979, to commemorate the occasion, which included performances from Chuck Berry, Billy Eckstine and others, the president credited Black music with “exemplifying the pursuit of happiness and as an avenue for understanding and friendship that has been effective when politicians could not succeed.”
And that wasn’t the first time Carter’s administration had recognized the contributions of Black musicians to American art.
Just six months prior at the end of his second year, the very first Kennedy Center Honors ceremony was held, where prominent American citizens are annually recognized for their lifetime contributions to the performing arts and American culture.
During Carter’s three years of celebrating the Honors, famous contralto Marian Anderson, jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald, and internationally acclaimed soprano Leontyne Price — all Black women — received Awards and were feted at the White House (although Jimmy’s wife Rosalynn sat in for the president during the December 1979 event due to the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis).
It’s important to note that Black music’s mainstream popularity had already occurred more than a decade earlier due to the Motown and Memphis-based soul popularized during the 1960s, and continued during the seventies largely because of the popular TV show Soul Train, the emergence of Philly soul and, later, the meteoric rise of disco. But its first real presidential advocate was Carter, whose commemorative decisions further validated Black artists’ growing presence in pop music and culture.
Black Music Lived Up To The Hype; Hip-Hop Emerges
By the time Carter was elected, Black self-contained bands like Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores, and the Isley Brothers were not just making hit singles, but releasing platinum or multi-platinum albums with regularity.
Black solo musicians were having even more success, with superstars like Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer and Michael Jackson all making significant career strides during the Carter years.
Wonder’s magnum opus, Songs In The Key Of Life, released in the weeks leading up to Carter’s election, had become the first album by a Black artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and would spend 14 weeks in the top spot (longer than any other by a Black musician until Thriller six years later).
Songs would spend its last week at No. 1 during the first full week of Carter’s presidency (another coincidence, I know, but the nation was already readying itself for Carter’s presidency during the bulk of Songs’ No. 1 chart run).
Disco queen Donna Summer later became the only artist to have three consecutive No. 1 double-vinyl albums beginning with 1978’s Live and More, then 1979’s Bad Girls, and finally On The Radio: Donna Summer’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1&2 in 1980… all three occurring on Carter’s watch.
And then there’s Michael Jackson, who’d had earlier success with his brothers and some big hit solo singles in the decade’s first half. His landmark 1979 album Off The Wall — released just weeks after both “Disco Demolition” and Carter’s designation of the inaugural Black Music Month — would be the key stepping stone to Jackson later becoming the most important musician of all during the ensuing decade.
But the most culturally significant Black music moment coinciding with Carter’s historic declaration happened when a popular disco/R&B band released the song that would change music forever.
“Good Times,” the ironically exuberant (for the country’s then-hard times), bass-driven funk jam recorded by the group Chic, was released in June 1979 — during the first Black Music Month — and would became a No. 1 smash later that summer.
Billboard named it the biggest soul chart hit of 1979 that December, but its most significant place in history occurred before year’s end when the Sugar Hill Gang, a young rap trio out of Englewood, NJ, released the single “Rapper’s Delight.”
That groundbreaking rap record heavily interpolated “Good Times” and, copyright entanglement aside, became the first hip-hop single to reach the pop top 40, providing the spark that took rap and hip-hop from its origins on impoverished New York City streets to America’s mainstream in January 1980, just as Carter was ending his third year in office.
Neither Carter nor anyone else at the time could’ve predicted the cultural significance of that moment or the irony of it coinciding with his creation of Black Music Month, but “Good Times” was clearly the spark that led to rap and hip-hop breaking out of its earlier New York confines and eventually becoming what is today’s most consumed form of music in America.
The lean years as Carter leaves office
It would be years, however, before rap would even come close to attaining that status, and Black music in general would see some very lean times on the way to this future level of success.
By the end of 1980, as Carter’s presidency was ending, several events had conspired to create a significant downturn in Black music’s popularity and market share as the new decade was taking shape.
Disco’s backlash, along with the growing popularity of country music (thanks to the enormous success of the Urban Cowboy soundtrack), plus middle-of-the-road (yacht) rock and adult contemporary music, as well as the mainstream emergence of new wave and punk acts like The Clash, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Police, The Cars and Devo, had resulted in Black musicians occupying a much smaller share of Billboard’s pop charts than in previous years.
It didn’t help that mainstream pop radio simply didn’t know what to do with funkier uptempo hits by Black musicians in the wake of disco’s demise, so, with few exceptions, program directors simply didn’t play or report those songs.
In 1981 and ‘82 — the first two years of Reagan’s presidency — no album by a Black recording act reached No. 1 on the main Billboard 200 album chart (the longest such drought since 1960-61). Thriller would become the first No. 1 LP in more than three years by a Black musician in February 1983, at the beginning of Reagan’s third year in office.
As the eighties morphed into the nineties, Black artists would eventually recover thanks to the impact of Thriller and, later, R&B/hip-hop. But it would be more than five years before those performers saw the kind of representation they’d experienced during Black music’s earlier peaks — including in 1979 in the midst of a Carter presidency when disco ruled.
Carter would (rightly) never claim credit for Black artists’ late-1970s success (just as Reagan couldn’t for their mid-1980s recovery post-Thriller). That credit belongs to the promotional and marketing decisions made by label executives who battled with radio (and later MTV bosses) to get those artists the exposure their talents so richly deserved.
Similarly, Carter had no creative input to some of the greatest rock, soul, disco and soundtrack albums of all time, which happened to coincide with his single term in office.
But his presidency was clearly encapsulated by some iconic music, some historic industry milestones and one bold presidential decision to create a celebration that occurs annually to the present day recognizing Black music’s important role in shaping American culture.
And his was a presidency partially made possible because of those rock musicians who campaigned for him, setting a blueprint for future presidents to follow, and earning him a legitimate claim to the title of being the nation’s first Rock and Roll President.
And then there’s that nuclear connection…
As disco was flaming out in the spring of 1979, another extremely hot and totally unrelated event would occur that March, which would shake the nation and call on the president to be… well, presidential.
It was on March 28, 1979, when an accident at Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, experienced a partial core meltdown in the second of its two reactors, TMI-2, causing the Pennsylvania Governor to call for a partial local evacuation and requiring the federal government to make sweeping safety reforms in the accident’s wake.
Officials from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — the overseeing federal agency charged with responding to and, in the very unlikely event it was necessary, intervening with the operating company’s efforts to bring the reactor to a safe condition — were famously met at the site by none other than President Carter (and late First Lady Rosalynn).
The president’s main objective of touring the site, besides getting a first-hand assessment of the plant’s damage from experts, was to calm a local community and, by extension, a nation that was already becoming skeptical of nuclear power and increasingly distrustful of government.
Carter ultimately succeeded at both goals — inspecting the accident scene and calming the nation — if only by his mere presence at the site just days into the developing situation.
Carter’s experience with nuclear energy predated his presidency. His service in the nuclear navy decades prior to becoming president lent some credibility to his TMI-2 response. In his earlier career, he had been lauded for helping “save” a small nuclear reactor at the Chalk River nuclear research facility in Ontario, Canada, which had itself experienced the world’s first partial core melt in December 1952.
Carter had been sent to Chalk River by the U.S. government — his prior work on nuclear-powered subs as a naval officer had come under Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “Father of the Nuclear Navy” — to assist Canadians with the cleanup and dismantling of the damaged reactor after it had overheated during a series of missteps by the facility’s operators, which led to the partial meltdown.
Carter had also previously done some work with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission — the forerunner to the NRC — which made him well suited for the cleanup task.
In a later autobiography, Carter described how he and dozens of fellow responders under his command would — in order to avoid overexposure to radiation — descend upon the Canadian reactor’s damaged components in short 90-second shifts to dismantle it. Even with those very controlled, short durations, the cleanup workers, including Carter, received more radiation exposure than today’s safety limits would allow.
Perhaps it was his risk-tolerance and this unique firsthand experience — no other U.S. president before or since Carter has had it — that would make him an unlikely proponent of nuclear power, right up to the time of the TMI-2 accident in the midst of his presidency.
At the time of that accident in 1979, the nuclear industry was expected to construct hundreds of reactors across the country in furtherance of Carter’s ambitious energy-independence goals. The accident at TMI-2 threatened the president’s policies at a time when he could least afford it.
As discussed above in the musical part of this article, the nation was engulfed in an energy crisis where America’s growing reliance on foreign oil and natural gas had led to unprecedented gasoline shortages and high prices, resulting in those long lines at gas stations that had become the ire of Americans and one of several growing stains on Carter’s presidency. Nuclear power had been expected to curb the nation’s reliance on foreign oil and natural gas significantly.
In the wake of TMI-2, construction of nuke plants in the United States either ground to a halt in some cases, or was cancelled before even breaking ground in others. Some reactors that were already far along in their construction continued to be built, despite the rising costs and higher financial risks associated with implementing the tighter safety requirements posed by the NRC, post-TMI.
More notably, nuclear power, which had been a huge part of Carter’s energy ambitions coming into his presidency only two years earlier, was conspicuously absent from his remarks about the country’s energy dilemma during that “crisis of confidence” speech he gave in July 1979, just two-and-a-half months after the accident. Instead, solar power was touted by the president — for the first time that night — as part of a newly established goal where that renewable source would provide 20 percent of the country’s energy needs “by the year 2000” (a mark that, so far, has never happened).
TMI’s Impact on Carter’s Administration (and my future employer)
The NRC itself didn’t escape TMI unscathed.
Carter had commissioned an independent study (led by John Kemeny, president of Dartmouth College) to review and assess the government’s role in overseeing the nuclear industry and how that could be improved after the accident. Carter’s goal, as it had been during his visit to the TMI-2 plant, was in part to repair the public’s perception about nuclear, rather than make a definitive statement about its viability as a continuing part of the country’s long term energy policy.
But The Kemeny Commission was highly critical of the “lax” industry and a “dysfunctional” NRC in a scathing report to the White House that had far-reaching recommendations, including calling for the abolishment of the five-member, presidentially appointed Commission at the top of the agency, which the report had deemed “headless,” and restructuring the NRC as a single-administrator, independent agency of the government’s executive branch.
The agency itself had only been five years removed from being both a proponent and regulator of the nuclear industry when it was structured as the Atomic Energy Commission — the Agency for which Carter had done work previously — before Congress statutorily divided those roles in 1974, creating NRC to be the regulatory arm of the federal government (the Department of Energy would become its energy advocacy arm).
Accordingly, some of the old guard at NRC, much of which had been there during the AEC days, was seen as being too sympathetic to an industry it once also promoted.
In the end, Carter as president would decide NRC’s fate while walking a tightrope as he continued to support nuclear (and NRC) but also sought to restore the public’s confidence in government. He publicly lauded and agreed with the Kemeny Report’s desire for change, but stressed that the nation should continue investing in nuclear for our own energy security. Some reforms at NRC would also occur, but the existing five-member Commission remained intact, albeit with additional powers given to its presidentially-appointed Chairman.
From a radiological standpoint, the potentially dire consequences of TMI had been narrowly avoided by having all of its damage contained within the reactor vessel and its containment structure, and with negligible offsite dose consequences to members of the public (although plant workers received higher than normal exposure). The Kemeny report had concluded that the incidents of cancer-related deaths caused by radiation exposure from the accident at TMI would be “minimal,” with a projected cancer death of from zero to ten.
Ten years following the TMI-2 accident, and eight years after Carter’s presidency ended, many organizational changes had been made at NRC, and dozens of post-TMI action items had been implemented at nuclear power plants across the country.
The cleanup of the TMI-2 reactor was still continuing as the tenth anniversary of the accident came and went (it has since been completed and both reactors at TMI are now undergoing decommissioning after the first unit continued to operate for another 40 years, shutting down permanently in September 2019). Unit 1 was recently identified as a candidate for restart by its current owner, which would place it among the first reactors to restart from a permanent shutdown in the United States.
What’s this blogger’s connection to all of this?
It was in July 1989 — just months after the accident’s tenth anniversary — that I joined NRC, the agency whose fate had laid in President Jimmy Carter’s hands a decade earlier.
NRC would be my employer for the next 33-and-a-half years, until December 2022, when I retired. For those three-plus decades, my colleagues and I worked to ensure that another TMI accident would never occur in this country.
Other accidents abroad would eventually exceed TMI in radiological significance (Chernobyl, 1986; Fukushima, 2011) and again challenge nuclear power’s resiliency as a part of the nation’s (and the world’s) energy mix, a discussion that continues even more fervently today as new technologies and more passive safety designs have come into existence.
Thankfully, due to a combination of factors credited to both NRC staff and the nuclear industry, as well as other non-governmental stakeholders, no U.S. president has had to respond to a domestic nuclear accident of the magnitude at TMI-2 since former President Carter, whether as a first-hand responder responsible for the dismantling of a damaged reactor, or as a U.S. president who sought to calm a worried nation in the aftermath of this country’s most significant event.
That fact, along with Mr. Carter’s undeniable musical connections, make him unique among the nation’s 46 presidents. Sure, his presidency was only four years, but those four years were crucial in the history and advancement of both this blogger’s passions — music and nuclear power — and were helmed by a man with intimate knowledge of both institutions.
In that sense, it would be safe to say that Carter — better known for his philanthropic efforts post-presidency than for what he did in office — was not only a musical hero for this blogger, but a nuclear power one as well.
Thank you for your service, your advocacy, and for your appreciation of music, Mr. President. You will definitely be missed!
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
You can also register for free (select the menu bars above) to receive notifications of future articles.
DJRob, thank you for a stunning review of all that President Carter brought to our country and the music he enjoyed during a vital part of the music industry. Including the particulars about addressing the need to the deal with nuclear’s role — or worry about it — but by a true american hero. As if this is enough to make for a well done post, you are then able to dig deeper into it all, including your own time during your role in caring for the nuclear age for a long-term time in the work you have worked on. I’ve always been fond of all you do and I hope that this epic post will be seen by many others. Excellence like this doesn’t come around much. Well done, sir!
Thank you so much for those compliments! It’s made easy when the subject is as exceptional as President Jimmy Carter was. He was a true American hero in every sense of the phrase. And thank you for taking the time to read it!