Oprah Winfrey is still hearing echoes from a brief singing chapter she clearly would not place among her proudest career moments, as reported [1] by Page Six.
The former host of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was reminded on Thursday about “Run On,” the self-recorded theme song she once performed for her daytime program.
The reminder came during an appearance on “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer,” where Keke Palmer began singing the tune back to her.
Winfrey did not try to soften her reaction or defend the old recording. Instead, she quickly treated the song as one of the more awkward entries in her career history.
“Girl, please,” Winfrey responded, as Palmer started singing the tune. “OK. That is one of the mistakes of my career.
“What had happened was, I was trying to decide, ‘Am I going to end the show or not end the show?’ And then I had a little talk with Jesus, and Jesus said, ‘You gotta keep going.’ And so I said, ‘You know, there’s this song. It’s an old spiritual.’”
“And then we realized, I can’t sing,” she quipped, “even though I took the singing lessons.”
The exchange put Winfrey’s short-lived singing stint back in the spotlight, nearly turning the old theme song into a fresh joke at her own expense.
Her comments made clear that the idea began while she was weighing the future of her show. According to Winfrey, that moment led her toward the traditional spiritual song.
The Emmy winner also confessed that the production choices around the song did not solve the issue she now hears so plainly.
Even adding a church choir for backup vocals could not hide what Winfrey described as the weakness of her rendition.
“It was bad. You know it was bad,” she concluded.
View this post on Instagram
The daytime TV star briefly sang her own theme song in the late ‘90s. Her show aired nationally between 1986 and 2011.
Because “The Oprah Winfrey Show” had such a long run, the theme song was only a small piece of the larger series. Still, it has clearly remained memorable enough to follow her decades later.
This was not the first time someone brought up Winfrey’s short-lived singing career.
Late singer Whitney Houston also played with the gospel-style theme song while appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1998 and 1999.
Houston playfully sang a snippet of the tune during those appearances, bringing the song back into the conversation on Winfrey’s own program.
Winfrey eventually walked away from the series in 2011 after 25 seasons of her iconic talk show.
Although she has continued to build her media empire, the music chapter has stayed closed.
For Winfrey, the verdict on “Run On” now sounds settled. The song may have come from a serious moment about whether to continue her show, but her present-day review is simple and brutally honest.
The old performance still haunts her, and she is not pretending otherwise. When Palmer revived the tune, Winfrey answered with the kind of self-aware bluntness that made the memory feel even more cringey.