When No One Stepped Up, This Brave High Schooler Did the Unthinkable During the National Anthem!

There are few things that get people excited like a passionate performance of the Star-Spangled Banner.

Just ask anyone who watched Jackson Dean Nicholson, a senior at Arundel High School in Maryland, a few years ago.

We’re not talking about his performance on the football field, but his pre-game singing of the national anthem. He wowed the home crowd and thousands of people online.

According to reports, Nicholson realized no one else was ready to sing the national anthem before his school’s game. He could have let the school play a recording or let the crowd sing themselves.

But Nicholson did something different. Before the game started, he stood alone on the field with just an acoustic guitar and a microphone and sang the national anthem.

He quickly delivered one of the best versions of the U.S. national anthem we’ve ever heard. It’s no surprise that the video became a viral hit and has resurfaced in popularity time and time again.

The video was first uploaded in 2018, and the fact that it’s still impressive now shows just how well Nicholson can sing.

“It was very cool. I probably knew 90 percent of the people sitting in those stands, and they had no idea I was doing it until I brought my guitar out,” Nicholson told the Baltimore Sun at the time.

While he was playing as a senior defensive end during his five minutes of fame, music is Nicholson’s true passion. He has been writing and singing songs since he was a freshman and was working on his own album around the same time he went viral.

Since there’s already a famous actor named Jack Nicholson, he chose the stage name Jackson Dean.

Talking about his football career in 2018, Jackson said: “This is my last year, then I’m done. I’ve got until January, I’ll have all my credits done, and I only have to be enrolled for this semester. I got a waiver from my principal and she’s very supportive of what I do. I’m going to go for it.”

Good luck, Jackson!

We can’t get over how amazing Jackson’s performance was, and we want as many people as possible to see it.

If you thought Jackson’s performance was brilliant, share this article to show your support!

15 Famous People of the Past Whose Depictions Prove That Photoshop Existed, Even in the Nineteenth Century

Photo editing programs have long been a part of our lives, so you can rarely see a photo that hasn’t been retouched. However, it’s wrong to think that Photoshop belongs only to the modern world. People have been improving the looks of their portraits for centuries. That means there were specialists in photo retouching that date all the way back to the nineteenth century. Even painters have worked hard to make models look more beautiful than they really were.

At Bright Side, we searched the archives and found photos of royalty from the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, and we compared them to their portrait paintings. At the end of the article, we’ll show you what Vincent van Gogh really looked like.