In the spacious front lawn of Ted Turner’s mansion, band members from the U.S. military gathered in 1980 to play “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Turner would use the recording to introduce CNN when it hit the air June 1, 1980 – as is tradition to kick off any Turner-owned network.
Turner then asked the band to record another song: “Nearer, My God, To Thee.”
That’s the same song (allegedly) played by the band aboard the sinking Titanic. As told by surviving passenger Lawrence Beesley:
“Many brave things were done that night, but none were more brave than those done by men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower in the sea,” Beesley said. “The music they played served alike as their own immortal requiem and their right to be recalled on the scrolls of undying fame.”
It was the last sound these passengers heard as they sank into the North Atlantic abyss in 1915.
So, too, will it be ours, whenever our day comes.
Why, Ted?
Ted Turner said “Nearer, My God, To Thee” would mark the end of CNN. And the world.
In 2015, former CNN intern Michael Ballaban released the archived footage of the haunting performance so the world could get a teaser of the apocalypse:
“So when Ted Turner said that CNN was going to be playing ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’—the song the band supposedly played when the Titanic went down—as the heavens opened up, as the fiery finger of God rained salt and brimstone from the sky, as the Earth beneath our feet opened from below and swallowed everything above, as the last CNN employee, in the last surviving CNN studio in the world, witnessed the end of existence before them, he meant it.”
*Shudders.*
If the world ends and brings me nearer, my God, to me, I will not be tuning into CNN.