In yet another episode in the saga of Kelly Clarkson‘s divorce, the singer is supposedly celebrating the fact that a judge has upheld her prenup, declaring that all her assets and income she earned during their marriage are hers, and not her soon-to-be ex-husband’s.
That’s according to TMZ, which claims that Kelly got the news on Wednesday while she was filming The Voice. Kelly’s estranged husband, Brandon Blackstock, had been contesting the prenup, and asked for their property to be divided — including the Montana ranch where he’s currently living — as well as the income she earned in the seven years they were together.
TMZ claims Kelly let out a scream of delight when she heard about the decision, and a celebration started on set, which included her fellow The Voice coaches, including Ariana Grande.
As TMZ notes, the divorce has been “bifurcated,” meaning the ruling that the marriage is over is separated from any ruling over custody and property issues. According to TMZ, the marriage itself should be officially ended within “days.”
Get ready to relive a national scandal with FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story.
The series has debuted its first full-length trailer, showing Clive Owen as President Bill Clinton, Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky, Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton, Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp, and Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones.
Impeachment: American Crime Story follows the story of Clinton’s affair with White House intern Lewinsky in the mid-’90s, his subsequent denials of the affair, and the impeachment proceedings that followed. It’s told mostly through the perspectives of Lewinsky, Tripp and Jones.
In the trailer, we even get a peek of Owen as Clinton uttering the president’s infamous line, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres September 7 on FX.
(NEW YORK) — Driven by the more transmissible delta variant, COVID-19 cases and deaths are up nationwide by more than 20% compared to last week’s seven-day average, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Thursday, and hospitalizations are up over 30% over the previous week.
On average, cases over the last seven days are up 24% from the week before, hospital admissions are up 31% and deaths are up 22%.
“As we have been saying, by far those at highest risk remain people who have not yet been vaccinated,” Walensky said at a White House briefing.
The surge in cases is far worse in certain areas of the country, although the vast majority of Americans now live in an area with dangerous levels of transmission.
Over the past week, Florida has had more cases of COVID than all 30 states with the lowest case rates combined, and Florida and Texas have together accounted for nearly 40% of new hospitalizations across the country in the last week, the White House said.
At the same time, 90% of counties are now considered to be areas of substantial or high transmission, which the CDC defines as more than 50 cases per 100,000 people or a test positivity rate higher than 8%.
“We all know that vaccines are the very best line of defense against COVID and how we end this pandemic,” White House COVID coordinator Jeff Zients said.
To that end, Zients heralded the news that vaccination rates continue to rise in states that have been hardest hit by the virus, including much of the Southeast.
Vaccinations have also doubled nationwide over the past month in the 12-17 age group, which is vital as kids return to school and are more at risk of getting or spreading the virus.
“For the first time since mid-June, we’re averaging about a half-million people getting newly vaccinated each and every day,” Zients said. “And overall in the last week, 3.3 Americans rolled up their sleeve to get their first shot.”
According to the White House, vaccinations over the past month have tripled in Arkansas and quadrupled in Louisiana, Alabama and MIssissippi — some of the least vaccinated states in the whole country, with uptake in the 30-40% range.
Florida, which has the second highest rate of COVID in the country, has also increased its vaccination rates. Though it had a higher vaccination rate than other hard-hit states prior to the delta surge, vaccinations have still more than doubled in the last month.
The increase couldn’t come soon enough, though, as tens of thousands of doses are expected to expire after months of slow vaccination rates.
While the full extent of COVID-19 vaccine waste in the U.S. remains unknown due to data reporting disparities between the states, research by ABC News found that 5,744 doses expired in Arkansas last month.
Health officials in Alabama confirmed to ABC News that in the past two weeks, approximately 35,147 doses have been discarded — accounting for more than half of the 65,000 doses that have gone unused in the state since the beginning of the year.
And in Mississippi, where the 35% vaccination rate is one of the lowest in the country, officials told ABC News that roughly 40,600 doses have expired so far.
Meanwhile, the CDC is encouraging vaccination among two more groups this week — pregnant women and immunocompromised Americans.
On Wednesday, the CDC announced new guidance that strongly urged pregnant women get vaccinated, based on more evidence that the vaccines are safe for mothers and their babies.
“We are strengthening our guidance and recommending that all pregnant people, or people thinking about becoming pregnant, get vaccinated. We now have new data that reaffirmed the safety of our vaccines for people who are pregnant, including those early in pregnancy and around the time of conception,” Walensky said Thursday.
She also pointed to new recommendations expected for people who didn’t have optimal responses to the first dose of their vaccines because of underlying health conditions, like cancer, HIV or organ transplants, and will soon be allowed to get a third dose of the mRNA vaccines, either Pfizer or Moderna.
“FDA is working with Pfizer and Moderna to allow boosters for these vulnerable people. An additional dose could help increase protections for these individuals, which is especially important as the Delta variant spreads,” Walensky said.
The FDA’s decision, which will be followed by a recommendation from the CDC on exactly who gets a third shot and how, will apply to about 3% of people, Walensky said.
The White House maintains that boosters are not yet needed for the general population, though they will eventually be necessary.
“Apart from the immunocompromised … we do not believe that others, elderly or non-elderly, who are not immunocompromise, need [an additional] vaccine right at this moment,” Fauci said.
“But this is a dynamic process, and the data will be evaluated,” he said. “So, if the data shows us that, in fact, we do need to do that, we’ll be very ready to do it and do it expeditiously.”
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos, Laura Romero, Soorin Kim, and Sasha Pezenik contributed to this report.
Regina Hall says she has her father to thank for her career in acting.
In an interview with Health magazine, Hall, who attended NYU grad school for journalism in her 20s, says that while she was always interested in acting, it was her father’s unexpected death that ultimately led her to pursue a career in the arts.
“It was his passing that really shifted how I looked at life — I realized how brief it can be and how suddenly it can change,” she said. “That’s what led me to acting. The thing about feeling broken is that it forces you to be open — you feel like you don’t have much, so you don’t overthink everything.”
After celebrating her 50th birthday this past December and surviving a pandemic, Hall now says she has a different perspective on life.
“I think it enforced that you can’t take anything for granted,” she says. “You have to have gratitude for every day that you have.”
The September 2021 issue of Health, featuring Regina Hall, is now available on newsstands.
(WASHINGTON) — The war of words between President Joe Biden, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other GOP governors escalated Thursday, raising new questions about how much politics and politicians should be involved in potentially life or death public health decisions.
At the White House, Biden addressed the ongoing debate — and in some cases, outright cultural war — around children being required to wear masks in school, arguing it shouldn’t be a “political dispute” even though that’s clearly what much of it has become.
“This isn’t about politics. This is about keeping our children safe,” he said. “To the mayors, school superintendents, educators, local leaders, who are standing up to the governors politicizing mask protection for our kids, thank you.”
Under pressure to act more forcefully as the delta variant rages across the South, Biden said earlier this week the White House is “checking” into how much power the federal government has to intervene as DeSantis threatened to withhold state funding from schools and officials adopting mask mandates in Florida — the state with the highest number of pediatric COVID-19 cases as kids head back to school.
It comes after weeks of growing tensions as some Republican governors — particularly in Florida and Texas — continue to fight against mask and vaccine mandates as COVID-19 cases skyrocket in their states. It also follows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issuing new guidance recommending indoor masking across-the-board for all staff, students and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist expert and founder of the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University School of Medicine, told ABC News that while the federal government has the authority to intervene — and should — it’s the responsibility of elected officials at the state and local level to rely on experts and not make public health decisions colored by appeals to their political base.
“Politicians have to, in a plague, yield to the best science and medical opinion, consensus opinion, that they can get,” Caplan said. “People who often did not take any science classes past high school should not be telling us how best to manage an infectious disease outbreak.”
Even the most scientific minds, however, can be influenced by politics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert Dr. Rochelle Walensky, in an interview published Thursday, hinted at regretting her decision in May to ditch masks if you’re vaccinated.
“There was an enormous pressure for vaccinated people to be able to do things that they wanted to get back to doing,” she told the Wall Street Journal.
Under pressure to follow the science, but also no doubt aware of polls showing what Americans want, Biden has often repeated he’s leaning on health experts like the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci in making his decisions, putting the onus on local leaders to take precautions, and not, as some critics have urged, using his presidential powers and influence to take more actions at the federal level.
DeSantis has taken a different approach with his political base, sending fundraising emails in recent weeks exploiting the conservative animosity toward the president and Fauci.
Speaking on ABC’s “GMA3” on Thursday, Fauci said it’s “so unfortunate” that an “ideological divide” is stopping some people from getting vaccinated.
“We’re dealing with a public health crisis, and you address a public health crisis by public health principles,” Fauci said. “Ideology, divisiveness has no place in this and yet, in many areas, it seems to dominate.”
Caplan also said it’s political — and the result, in the case of DeSantis, is harming the people of Florida and beyond.
“The core of his party is still anti-mandates, whether it’s vaccine or masks, and has never shown any enthusiasm for tough public health measures, that’s just political and it is true, despite the fact that Trump is vaccinated, Abbott is vaccinated,” Caplan said. “It’s not like conservative GOP leadership hasn’t been vaccinated.”
But thousands of their constituents are not.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll from July illustrates how partisanship has infected pandemic attitudes and behavior.
Ninety-three percent of Democrats say they either have been vaccinated or definitely or probably will do so; that plummets to 49% of Republicans. Independents are between the two at 65%. And while Republicans are far less likely to get a shot, just 24% see themselves as at risk for infection.
“The bottom line is, look at a map, see where the dead and hospitalized people are, then ask yourself, if the governor’s policies in Texas and Florida make any sense,” Caplan said.
Some Republican governors who have issued orders effectively forbidding local officials from requiring masks in schools, continued with a firing exchange of words with the White House this week as kids, many too young to be vaccinated, head back to the classrooms across the country.
Asked on Wednesday about a recent New York Post headline framing Biden as “kneecapping” DeSantis, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is not out to get DeSantis but wants him to participate in their efforts to combat COVID-19 — which, she said, he has not.
“Our war is not on DeSantis. It’s on the virus, which we’re trying to kneecap, and he does not seem to want to participate in that effort to kneecap the virus — hence our concern,” she said at an afternoon press briefing.
DeSantis slammed the White House earlier Wednesday and vowed that he would “fight back vociferously” against any attempt by the administration to find a way to pay the salaries of school officials that defy his state ban on mask mandates as he threatens to withhold state funding from those that adopt them.
“If you’re talking about the federal government coming in and overruling parents and our communities, that would be something that we would fight back vociferously against,” DeSantis told reporters in St. Petersburg outside of an elementary school.
The governor is facing at least two lawsuits from parents, and several school districts in Florida have already voted to mandate masks despite his executive order, citing data in their lawsuits that masks are proven to help slow the spread and noting that most kids are still too young to be eligible for vaccinations.
“It is a common sense, reasonable accommodation for a vulnerable child who is immunocompromised or at risk of a serious disease to require a public entity to implement simple precautions to ensure that the most vulnerable children are safe,” one lawsuit said, adding the order allegedly “harms the children who the disability discrimination laws were enacted to protect.”
The White House has praised the “courage” of school officials who have chosen to defy the order and said it’s looking into whether unused funding from the federal government’s American Rescue Plan could be used to make up the difference in funds DeSantis threatens to withhold. Texas, meanwhile, is dealing a similar hand.
Since Biden last week called out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott by name, along with DeSantis, as leaders who need to “help or get out of the way,” Abbott has also stuck defiantly behind his order banning mask mandates — despite hospitals becoming so overwhelmed that Abbot has called for out-of-state medical personnel to come help mitigate the surge of COVID-19 cases there.
Under Abbott’s order, institutions that defy the governor’s mask mandate ban are subject to a $1,000 fine. At least two school districts there have announced they still will require masks, and the tides appear to be turning in their favor.
“Any school district, public university, or local government official that decides to defy GA-38—which prohibits gov’t entities from mandating masks—will be taken to court,” Abbott said in a tweet.
Amid the growing concerns with sending kids back to school amid a surge in pediatric COVID-19 cases, it’s not clear under what authority the White House will actually step in when it comes to fines to educators. Psaki reiterated on Wednesday they are “looking into ways we can help the leaders at the local level who are putting public health first continue to do their jobs,” and speaking with the Department of Education.
Biden took a shot at those governors restricting schools’ abilities to issue mandates on Tuesday, without naming names, saying, “I find that totally counterintuitive and, quite frankly, disingenuous” but admitted he didn’t currently believe he had the authority under law to directly intervene on any state government’s mask mandate.
“I don’t believe that I do, thus far. We’re checking that,” Biden said.
Caplan told ABC News that the federal government “can and should” look at ways in which Texas and Florida are gaining certain federal benefits and suspend them — “until they drop these absurd prohibitions and return to solid public health advice.”
“I would try to turn up the pain on the governors in terms of economic consequences of their ill-thought-out, morally wrong policies, and the justification is you’re putting the rest of the country at risk,” Caplan said. “Because not only are they endangering their own state residents, they’re putting the rest of us at risk.”
Madonna attends the opening ceremony of the Mercy James Children’s Hospital; AMOS GUMULIRA/AFP via Getty Images
For her upcoming birthday on August 16, Madonna wants get in bed with you — metaphorically and physically.
Madonna is asking her fans to help support the Mercy James Centre, the hospital she built in Malawi four years ago, which is the only pediatric intensive care unit in the entire country. Specifically, she needs more beds in the hospital — 50 of them, to be exact — so she’s asking fans to donate money to purchase those beds.
“I want to ensure that every child that comes into that hospital and has an operation or surgery of any kind has a bed to recuperate in afterwards, and is taken care of,” Madonna explains in an Instagram video.
She adds, “I will name that bed after you and you will forever be, not only in my heart, but in the hearts of all the children of Malawi and their families. Thank you in advance for your generosity, and happy birthday to me!”
You can donate at RaisingMalawi.org. If you’ve got deep pockets, you can donate $5,000 and get a bed named after you. If you don’t have that kind of money, you can donate $2,500 and share the bed name with one other donor, or $500, to have your name listed with nine other donors.
Even if you can’t afford that, you can give $100 to contribute to a nurse’s salary, or even $25 to pay for a month’s worth of medicine for one child.
Of course, helping the children of Malawi is one of Madonna’s pet causes, because it’s the country where four of her children — David, Mercy, Stella and Estere — were born.
(JACKSONVILLE, Fla.) — Lila Hartley, from Jacksonville, Florida, took matters into her own hands when she heard Duval County Public Schools wouldn’t require masks for the upcoming school year: She wrote a letter to the school board and superintendent pushing for a mask mandate.
“I would like to encourage the requirement of masks at school in Duval County. Right now, especially while the Delta variant is surging, hospitalizing and killing so many kids. I really believe masks should be required,” she wrote in the letter, which was shared with “Good Morning America.”
“This pandemic is still around,” Lila told “GMA” of why she wrote the letter. “People are still dying and getting sick. Masks save lives, and I don’t want my brother to die.”
While Lila and her family are vaccinated, her brother Will, 10, is too young to receive the vaccine.
“I am so worried that if masks are not required my brother could go to school one day and the next be dying in the hospital,” the letter continued. “We are siblings so we have our rivalries but I don’t know what I would do if he died, especially if it was caused by a place that means so much to him, school.”
Will is also a big supporter of masks and finds himself reminding his friends to wear theirs properly.
“Masks do help us,” he told “GMA.” “I wear my mask because even though the rest of my family is vaccinated, there’s still a chance they can get it.”
Lila emailed a copy of her letter to the board on July 26, and has only heard back from one of the board members so far, she said.
On July 30, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order banning schools from requiring masks. If schools are found to be in violation, they may lose state funding.
According to the governor’s office, the order was in response to “several Florida school boards considering or implementing mask mandates” and to “protect parents’ freedom to choose whether their children wear masks.”
Following the executive order, the Duval County school board held a meeting Aug. 3 to decide on whether it would require masks for the upcoming school year.
Lila and her brother demonstrated with a number of others outside the meeting in favor of masks, while her father, Matt Hartley, and other parents, educators, and medical professionals voiced their opinions inside.
“We wanted to support dad because he’s been working hard,” Lila said.
“We’re fighting for ourselves, but we’re fighting for other kids too,” Hartley told “GMA.” “That’s our M.O. — we love our neighbors.”
The board voted 5-2 in favor of requiring masks with a parental opt-out. Parents will not have to provide a reason for opt-outs.
Hartley said that while the vote did “make things a lot better with masking,” he’s “disappointed” as it still leaves a lot of room for people to not wear them.
In a statement provided to ABC News, Duval County School Board Chairwoman Elizabeth Anderson said, “The Board’s emergency policy decision Tuesday night creates the best balance between our deeply held responsibility for the safety and welfare of students and staff while fully respecting parental choice under the Governor’s order.”
“It’s important to wear masks because it keeps each other safe,” Lila, who one day hopes to be secretary of state, said. “If I’m wearing a mask and the other person is wearing a mask then we’re both safe and not giving each other our germs and possibly COVID.”
(WASHINGTON) — The State Department will begin reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon will send troops in to help facilitate those departures, as Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals.
There wasn’t any specific event that led President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to execute the plan, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Thursday afternoon, but rather the overall worsening trend in Afghanistan.
“There wasn’t one precipitating event in the last couple of days that led the president and the secretary to make this decision. It’s a confluence of events, and as I’ve been saying for now for several weeks, we have been watching very closely with concern the security situation on the ground — and far better to be prudent about it and be responsible and watching the trends to make the best decisions you can for safety and security of our people than to wait until it’s too late,” Kirby said.
The events in Afghanistan over the last 24 hours with the Taliban pressuring major Afghan cities was a significant factor in the decision to go forward with the reduction in staffing and the new military mission, a U.S. official told ABC News.
Biden held a meeting with his team Wednesday night and tasked them to come up with recommendations, according to a senior administration official. Then, at a meeting Thursday morning with Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the recommendations were presented to Biden and he gave the order to move forward.
The official also said the president separately spoke with Secretary of State Antony Blinken Thursday morning to discuss a diplomatic strategy and that Biden continues to be engaged on this issue and is staying in close contact with his team on the situation.
State Department Spokesman Ned Price said that while the embassy in Kabul will remain open, they will be reducing their civilian footprint due to the “evolving security situation.” He added that they expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.
“What this is not — this is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not the wholesale withdrawal,” Price said Thursday. “What this is, is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint. This is a drawdown of civilian Americans who will, in many cases, be able to perform their important functions elsewhere, whether that’s in the United States or elsewhere in the region.”
The United Kingdom is also sending military personnel — about 600 paratroopers — to Kabul on a short-term basis to provide support to British nationals leaving the country, according to a joint press release from the Ministry of Defence and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The number of staffers working at the British Embassy in Kabul has also been reduced to a core team focused on providing consular and visa services for those needing to rapidly leave the country.
In a briefing at the Pentagon, the Defense Department’s top spokesman announced that it’s sending 3,000 troops from three infantry battalions — two Marine and one Army — to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to help out with the removal of American personnel from the U.S. embassy.
The State Dept. will begin reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon will send troops in to help facilitate those departures, as Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals. @IanPannell & @LMartinezABC report. https://t.co/PILkULaxcqpic.twitter.com/FR2OTOLFNt
They’ll be there “temporarily” and will begin shipping out in the next 24 to 48 hours. These numbers are on top of the 650 already in Kabul protecting the airport and the embassy.
An additional 1,000 personnel will be sent to assist with the processing of Afghans who worked as interpreters, guides and other contractors and applied for Special Immigrant Visas.
“I want to stress that these forces are being deployed to support the orderly and safe reduction of civilian personnel at the request of the State Department and to help facilitate an accelerated process of working through SIV applicants,” Kirby said. “This is a temporary mission with a narrow focus. As with all deployments of our troops into harm’s way, our commanders have the inherent right of self defense, and any attack on them can and will be met with a forceful and appropriate response.”
Furthermore, a brigade of 3,000 to 3,500 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne will be sent to Kuwait to pre-position in case they are needed further.
Kirby called it a “very temporary mission for a very temporary purpose,” and said the DOD expects to keep no more than 1,000 troops in Kabul to protect the airport and embassy after the Aug. 31 deadline — a number that has notably crept up from the 650 troops originally set to remain.
Price said they will continue to relocate qualified Afghans who assisted the American mission, such as interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government, and flights will ramp up in the coming days.
Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that after a meeting with business leaders Thursday afternoon she would leave to “continue the briefings that we’ve been receiving.”
The U.S. embassy in Kabul has also urged Americans to evacuate Afghanistan immediately, amid fears that the capital could fall into Taliban hands in a matter of weeks.
A military analysis said the city could be isolated in 30 to 60 days and be captured in 90 days, a U.S. official told ABC News, but that timeline seemed even more accelerated Thursday as the Taliban claimed Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — The State Department will begin reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon will send troops in to help facilitate those departures, as Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals.
State Department Spokesman Ned Price said that while the embassy in Kabul will remain open, they will be reducing their civilian footprint due to the “evolving security situation.” He added that they expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.
“What this is not — this is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not the wholesale withdrawal,” Price said Thursday. “What this is, is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint. This is a drawdown of civilian Americans who will, in many cases, be able to perform their important functions elsewhere, whether that’s in the United States or elsewhere in the region.”
In a briefing at the Pentagon, the Defense Department’s top spokesman announced that it’s sending 3,000 troops from three infantry battalions — two Marine and one Army — to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to help out with the removal of American personnel from the U.S. embassy.
They’ll be there “temporarily” and will begin shipping out in the next 24 to 48 hours. These numbers are on top of the 650 already in Kabul protecting the airport and the embassy.
An additional 1,000 personnel will be sent to assist with the processing of Afghans who worked as interpreters, guides and other contractors and applied for Special Immigrant Visas.
Furthermore, a brigade of 3,000 to 3,500 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne will be sent to Kuwait to pre-position in case they are needed further.
Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that after a meeting with business leaders Thursday afternoon she would leave to “continue the briefings that we’ve been receiving.”
Price said they will continue to relocate qualified Afghans who assisted the American mission, such as interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government, and flights will ramp up in the coming days.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul has also urged Americans to evacuate Afghanistan immediately, amid fears that the capital could fall into Taliban hands in a matter of weeks.
A military analysis said the city could be isolated in 30 to 60 days and be captured in 90 days, a U.S. official told ABC News, but that timeline seemed even more accelerated Thursday as the Taliban claimed Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
A new archival Elvis Presley box set focusing on May-June 1971 recording sessions that the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll did in Nashville will be released as a four-CD set and digitally on November 12.
Elvis: Back in Nashville features recordings Presley made with his session musicians that were intended for use in various releases. Some of the recordings, after being augmented by orchestral and vocal overdubs, wound up — with subsequent orchestral and vocal overdubs — on 1971’s Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas, the Grammy-winning 1972 gospel album He Touched Me, 1972’s Elvis Now and 1973’s Elvis.
A special unboxing event for the Elvis: Back in Nashville package takes place today in Memphis at the Guest House Theater at Graceland as part of Elvis Week 2021, and will stream live at YouTube.com/ElvisPresley and Facebook.com/ElvistheMusic starting at 5 p.m. ET.
Back in Nashville features a total of 82 tracks, and includes songs from a variety of genres. Disc One includes various country and folk covers, a selection of Ivory Joe Hunter tunes featuring just Elvis and piano accompaniment, and renditions of classic pop compositions, including “My Way.”
Disc Two focuses on contemporary and classic gospel and Christmas songs.
Disc Three features additional country and folk tunes, including an epic rendition of Bob Dylan‘s “Don’t Think Twice, (It’s Alright),” as well as covers of such rock songs as Chuck Berry‘s “Johnny B. Goode” and The Beatles‘ “Lady Madonna.”
Disc Four boasts outtake versions of various religious and holiday songs.
One of the tracks, a raw first-take version of the song “I’m Leavin’,” has been released as an advance digital single.
A two-LP vinyl version of Back in Nashville also will be available, while Graceland.com is offering an exclusive colored-vinyl edition.
