(Credits: Recording Academy)
Sat 15 November 2025 1:00, UK
When legendary pianist Pinetop Perkins collected a Grammy for ‘Best Traditional Blues Album’ in 2011, the 97-year-old was wheeled to the stage and helped to the microphone, where he tried to bring some humour to the moment: “Since I got old, you can call me Pinebottom now”.
When he died a month later, at the time, Perkins seemed likely to go down in history as the oldest person to ever win a Grammy, considering the rather slim number of centenarians still putting out records. But, earlier this year, Pinetop’s reign ended when a gold phonograph was awarded, albeit posthumously, for ‘Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording’.
The winner wasn’t a musician, an actor, an author, a comedian, or any of the usual Grammy suspects, but instead was the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s 2025 Grammy win, for the audiobook version of his 2024 memoir Last Sundays In Plains: A Centennial Celebration, made him the oldest Grammy winner in history at the age of 100. The former president, who died the previous December, was represented on Grammy night by his grandson Jason Carter.
Cynical award show watchers might attribute this victory to a ‘sympathy vote’ or ‘legacy nod’, but President Carter had actually made a habit of racking up Grammys in his later years, as the 2025 win was his fourth overall, having previously won in 2007, 2016, and 2019, in the ‘Spoken Word’ category for audiobooks of his written works. The consistency of those wins underscored how Carter, not a wildly popular president during his years in office in the late 1970s, had found a surprising second act niche as a beloved apolitical figure, increasingly revered for his humility, compassion, and charitable work.
His success placed him among an elite but unusual group of Grammy nominees and winners from the political world, including several other US presidents, such as Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who were all nominated for audio recording awards, and Bill Clinton, who won two trophies, one in 2004 for narrating My Life and another for his contributions to Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf / Beintus: Wolf Tracks, a children’s classical recording he shared with Mikhail Gorbachev and Sophia Loren.
Then there’s Barack Obama, who aside from his three Emmy wins, is a two-time Grammy winner for the audiobook versions of Dreams from My Father in 2006 and The Audacity of Hope, while Michelle Obama, author and First Lady, matched her husband’s feat with two Grammy wins of her own, showing us what a real power couple looks like.
More Grammy nomination instances outside the Oval Office include prominent US political figures such as Hillary Clinton, who won in 1997 for the spoken word recording of her book It Takes a Village, and audio versions of books by Al Gore, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have all earned them shoutouts as well, revealing a pattern of an interesting overlap between politics and storytelling, where presidents and policymakers, freed from campaign trails and press conferences, can connect with audiences in a more reflective, personal way, presuming they’re capable and desiring of it.
Jimmy Carter’s achievements still remain pretty unique, however. His four Grammys are more than any other president’s total, and his longevity means he has set a record unlikely to be matched anytime soon. Although Mel Brooks, David Attenborough, and Dick Van Dyke are all 99 and pretty active, so one hesitates to speak too soon.
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