Country music singer and songwriter Lee Greenwood said putting God first was a “conscious thought” with “no doubt about it” when he wrote the lyrics to his iconic patriotic song “God Bless the USA.”
He said his belief in the military, as well as his faith as a Christian and his need to express that, both played an important part in writing the song.
He said the song took on its own life after it became song of the year in 1985 for the Country Music Association.
He said it later lifted up America during the Gulf War and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York in 2001.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing for Greenwood, though, who came from humble beginnings and was raised on a farm.
“I didn’t have much, but I didn’t know that I didn’t have much,” he said.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor during World War II, Greenwood’s father joined the Navy, leaving his mother to raise him and his sister, Greenwood said. He said his mother decided to divorce his father because of that and moved the family to his grandparents’ farm in Sacramento, California.
“You’ve got to remember that during World War II, everybody sacrificed. ... My grandparents were not any exception to that,” he said. “Being sharecroppers, we didn’t have a lot of land, so there wasn’t a lot of money to go around.”
But there was a small piano in his family’s trailer that he would play at night for fun. With that, “I had all I needed, and music came easy,” he said.
Soon, he was able to play songs from the radio.
“I’m talking 9, 10, 11 years old, and we only had a very small radio that I could get a couple of stations on,” he said.
Greenwood said his grandparents, who were his guardians, sent him to the First Baptist Church in North Sacramento when he was around nine years old. There, he sang in the choir.
“I remember my first song that I ever sang in church was O Holy Night, and I was scared to death because the pastor was all full of brim and fire,” he said.
He said he enjoyed having faith while singing in the choir and that it gave him a great deal of spirit and harmony, but it wasn’t until later that singing became his focus.
“I didn’t really become what you would call a commercial singer and stand out in front of the band to sing until I was probably in my 20s,” he said.
He said after his mother remarried, he spent a year in Orange County with her and attended Anaheim High School, where he started to learn other instruments.
Then he moved back to Sacramento to finish high school at Norte del Rio. He was the drum major for the marching band and played the saxophone in the dance band.
“I worked in nightclubs at 15 years old,” he said, “because in those days every quartet had a saxophone player, and I was the only one in Sacramento they wanted.”
After high school, he got his own band together and moved to Las Vegas because that’s where the money was, and he ended up staying for 20 years, he said.
“I don’t believe I had a lot of faith in Nevada; I was chasing my career so very hard,” he said. “I had a marriage and a divorce, another marriage and a divorce. I could not find the thing that would keep my feet on the ground.”
It was when Greenwood moved to Nashville that he met his current wife, who helped bring him back to the faith that he had been missing, he said.
He said they met in 1989 and were married in 1992, and at the time he had already written “God Bless the USA” in a search for that faith, but it was his wife who embraced that part of his career and helped him to have the strongest faith he could possibly have.
“I believe she’s the one that brought me back to the belief that I knew was there; I just was missing it,” he said.
He said he’s been told several times that the lyrics to “God Bless the USA” are indelible, but Greenwood noted that he’s not necessarily prophetic and that English was not his best subject.
“However, because in my early days I didn’t make an awful lot of money and sometimes I had to write letters to people about expressing my sympathy for not paying bills on time, I got pretty good at letter writing,” he said. “I got better at English because every time I didn’t know how to spell a word, I got the dictionary and I looked it up.”
He said when he wrote “God Bless the USA,” he chose to mention various cities because his intent was to encompass the entire country.
He said the song has been a major highlight for him because it’s his best-known song, but it doesn’t encompass his whole career. He has multiple country songs that went number one, with 36 studio albums as a country artist, and he has been employed by five different record companies.
The then-presidential candidate had just survived an attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, two days before, where a bullet grazed his ear. One person in the Butler audience was killed, and two others were critically injured during the incident.
“When I finished the first verse, I’m looking at the president walking in, walking very slow, very deliberately,” Greenwood said. “I knew at that moment, ‘I’m going to have to make this go longer.’”
Fortunately, he said, the Six Wire band that was playing with him had worked for him during the time when the song was new, and it had played USO tours with him.
“The band knew that I wanted to go longer. I didn’t have to say it,” he said.
The band kept playing until Trump got into the box, with JD Vance, who would later become vice president, standing next to him.
“Then I got eye contact with Trump Jr., and we were friends, and I noticed he had a very solemn look about him, not the jubilant look you would expect for the election now of his father. He was actually scanning the room looking for any possible threat, and I knew that that was the case. I too was a little nervous about that, because he’d just been shot, and so when I got eye contact with him, and he gave me sort of a nod, I knew that was the moment to finish the song. So before I did, I welcomed the president, and the place went crazy.”
Greenwood said Trump is a very gentle spirit; he’s shaken his hand many times, and he draws him in and gives him a bear hug.
After Greenwood sang for Trump’s entrance at a Madison Square Garden campaign rally last year, Trump gave him a slap on the back as he left the stage, “which shows his friendship, his fellowship, his desire to be a friend,” Greenwood said.
As a trustee at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, appointed by Trump, Greenwood said, “I believe we’re going to just go back the way it has always been, and that’s inviting any wonderful act, any wonderful live performance, whether it’s ballet or symphony or piano player or an athlete, somebody that presents wonderful entertainment for an audience that expects higher achievement.”
