Barbra Streisand honors essential workers in new music video

In a tribute to heath care professionals and other essential workers, Barbra Streisand has reworked a classic song performance of "You'll Never Walk Alone" to raise funds for protective gear.

"I sang this song almost 20 years ago after 9/11," the music legend, 78, posted on social media Tuesday with her more than 4 ½-minute video to benefit the disaster-relief organization Direct Relief. "Today we face another crisis, but I think the words still apply. With love and gratitude, Barbra."

Following a somber drumbeat, Streisand's voice emerges as a photo of an anguished medical professional in a hospital room, his head in his hands, appears. Then, interspersed with a slideshow of health care workers — their faces etched with marks from recently removed masks, their hands holding each other for support — comes Streisand's performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard that closed the Emmy Awards ceremony on Nov. 4, 2001, less than two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In place of the original intercut images of Americans reacting to the siege, and of a wall behind Streisand at Los Angeles' Shubert Theatre bearing the names of Sept. 11 victims, the new version intersperses her moving performance with images not only of medical professionals and first responders, but also of U.S. Postal Service and UPS workers, a grocery clerk, packers in factories, and people waiting in line for food and supplies.

It ends with shots of doctors and nurses savoring hard-earned triumphs over the disease, of homemade signs thanking front-line workers, and of candles lit in evident memoriam for those lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. The video then says in graphical text, "Direct Relief supplies protective gear to all our heroes in the United States," and gives a link and a phone number for donations.

"You'll Never Walk Alone," from the much-revived 1945 Broadway musical "Carousel," is a ballad of hope and resilience. Appearing twice in Act 2, it first is sung by the character Nettie Fowler to comfort her niece Julie after the violent death of Julie's husband, and then closes the show in a companywide rendition as the couple's daughter graduates high school and faces an uncertain world.