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Hear Eddie Vedder “Sing a Prayer” for Chris Cornell With Gospel Choir at Global Citizen Festival

Over the weekend, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam was a performer at Global Citizen: Mandela 100, a music festival and fundraising event in Johannesburg, South Africa, honoring the legacy of the late Nelson a century after he was born. Vedder began his performance solo with an acoustic guitar, but was soon joined by the Soweto Gospel Choir, who accompanied him for a performance of the 1995 Pearl Jam B-side “Long Road,” as Alternative Nation points out. Vedder introduced the song by saying that he and the choir would “sing a bit of a prayer for you,” and later added that the song was dedicated to Mandela and “my brother Chris.”

The lyrics to “Long Road,” which Vedder originally wrote in memory of a high school teacher who’d mentored him, feature lines like “Holding hands of daughters and sons, And their faiths are falling down / I have wished for so long /How I wish for you today.”

Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell died last year. Vedder has given numerous onstage tributes to his late friend and occasional collaborator since Cornell’s death, both solo and with Pearl Jam. “He wasn’t just a friend, he was someone I looked up to like my older brother,” Vedder said in concert last June.

Watch the performance below. The dedication of “Long Road” begins at 6:02:00 in the official Global Citizen video of the entire festival.