‘The Hollywood Reporter’ Might Have Had the Grammys’ Worst Tweet

Tina Turner passed away in 2023, and the Grammys decided to honor her by having the legendary singer Fantasia Barrino sing “Proud Mary” at the ceremony. While a stellar performance and one worthy of note, The Hollywood Reporter had to go and ruin that by tweeting the wrong title.

Boy oh boy is this insulting to so many people all at the same time. Turner’s cover of “Proud Mary” has become the go-to version of the song. Originally released in 1969, the song was written by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the band recorded it in 1968. Then, Ike and Tina Turner released their cover of the song in 1970, before it became a single in 1971.

All of this history is to show you just how important “Proud Mary” is as a song, not only to Turner and her legacy but to the music industry as a whole. And yet, for some reason, when The Hollywood Reporter tweeted out a video of Barrino singing the song and dancing during the In Memoriam section of the show, they decided to call the song “Rolling on the River.”

For nearly a full hour, the video sat on X without a single peep from the publication until they finally tweeted a follow up tweet with a correction.

The entire situation proves one thing: You should maybe have someone working for you who knows music if you’re covering the Grammys.

You don’t have to be a music expert but come on.

As a music fan on top of all my other interests, I know one thing is easy to use when talking about music: Google. Sometimes a song is called something completely different from the lyrics. “Baba O’Riley” by The Who famously comes to mind because most everyone thinks that it is called “Teenage Wasteland.” But I do not tweet things with authority that are this wrong.

Look, we all make mistakes and that’s fine, but you’re covering the Grammys and didn’t think to double check you had the song title right? On a performance that was honoring Tina Turner, while the songwriter of “Proud Mary” is still alive? It’s all around just a disrespectful look. One look in the replies to the tweet and you’ll see how many people found this incredibly disrespectful.

You might think that it is a simple mistake, one that just went on the idea of the lyric they heard the most in the song, but it shows a problem with our profession as a whole. Instead of having the facts, people want to be first, and then mistakes like this make it to publication. Everyone was right to call out this mistake because it was an easy fact-check that just wasn’t done!

Hopefully, they all learned their lesson because the song does, repeatedly, say “Proud Mary.”

(featured image: Amy Sussman/Getty Images)