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Aug. 30, 2025 - Epoch Times
01:08:41
John Rich Explains Story Behind ‘The Devil and the TVA’
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Warner Brothers Records started calling me to meetings and saying, Hey, you can't say stuff like that.
You are causing radio programmers to not play your music because they don't agree with you.
And if we can't sell your music, then this is no go.
Today I sit down with multi platinum country music artist, John Rich.
We discuss his incredible career journey, his songwriting process, and how he was able to remain successful without relying on record labels.
You're giving up all that big push that you get from a major company, but what are you getting in return?
You're able to say what you want to say, exactly how you want to say it.
Your freedom of speech is invaluable.
We also discuss how John uses his music to be what he calls a citizen advocate.
They pull up on her property, people get out of the cars, bulletproof vests, loaded weapons, and this lady is going, Who are all these people?
I told him, You got two weeks.
If you don't get out of our county, I'm going to write a song about the TVA and you'll never be the same.
Music is my weapon of choice, not being a politician.
Music.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jania Kelleck.
John Rich, so good to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be here.
Thanks for making the trip to Nashville, sitting right in the middle of my house.
Well, and an incredible day performance venue, apparently.
Yeah.
You know, the truth is I have very little experience with country music, but a formative experience because my father was really into Johnny Cash.
And it seems like only Johnny Cash and Edith Piaf, different genre.
Yeah.
But I still remember Live from Folsom Prison.
I can play it in my mind.
Because we listened to that cassette tape so many times as a child.
Yeah.
With very, very warm memories.
Let's just talk a little bit about how you got into this, you know, before we get into the whole, everything you've been doing, you know, in American politics.
And the culture, the American politics, and the culture shaping culture and all that.
How did you even get into this in the first place?
So I grew up listening to records like Life from Folsom Prison.
My dad is a preacher, but loved country music, loved the old stuff.
So we had Life from Folsom Prison, we had Roger Miller, we had Tennessee Ernie Ford, we had all the greats from that fifty and sixty era of country music.
And my dad is a really good singer, really good guitar player.
So, you know, at family events, when you get through eating and everyone's sitting around, my dad would always pull out his guitar and my granddaddy, his dad, wanted to hear Boy Name Sue.
Play Boy Name Sue.
And he's over there smoking Marlboro Ridge, you know, one after the other.
Play a boy named Sue.
And my grandma just called out songs and my dad knew them all and would play them.
And I always thought that was just so cool that my dad could just sit there and play them one after the next after the next.
So one of my dad's extra jobs was giving guitar lessons.
And so he let me tag along when I was about five years old in Amarilla, Texas, up in the Panhandle to a guitar lesson.
And he had all these adults sitting in a room and he had me kind of sit behind him and he handed me a little cheapy guitar, you know, a little kid guitar.
He goes, you'll just follow along.
Well, after about the second lesson, I was picking it up faster than the adults that he was teaching.
And my dad went, Wow, you're picking that up pretty fast.
Let me show you some other stuff.
So now at home he starts showing me stuff.
And man, I just thought it was the greatest thing ever to be able to do what my dad was able to do, pick up a guitar.
And now when my granddaddy would say, Play boy named Sue, I could pick up my guitar up too and bang along right with my dad.
So it really started from that.
It was something my dad did and something I got to do with my dad.
Make music with your dad.
I mean, what's better than that?
Never, never dreamed in a million years that it would be something you could have a career in, but it's turned out that way.
Was there just, was there some moment where you knew, okay, I'm going to give it a chance on the career path?
When I was about fifteen, about fifteen years old, so we moved from Texas to Tennessee when I was in ninth grade.
And so I finished high school in Tennessee.
And I started to realize after meeting some kids at school that there were connections to these great country singers I had grown up listening to, Ricky Skaggs for instance.
So one of the boys I became friends with said, Yeah, my dad drives a bus for Ricky Skaggs.
And I said, Ricky Skaggs rides on a bus?
I'm thinking like a school bus.
He goes, Well, yeah, tour bus.
And I went, How different is that from a school bus?
I had no idea.
He goes, it's like he lives on it.
My dad drives him.
I said, Your dad knows Ricky Skaggs.
He goes, He's been driving his bus for ten years.
And I realized at that moment I was within 35 or 40 miles from Music Row.
I mean, from the epicenter of country music.
And so the second I got my driver's license, I started driving into Nashville looking for talent contests, open mic nights, anything I could get in.
I was too young to get in, but I would talk my way in.
And I would say, I'll sit in the corner.
I'll drink a glass of water.
I just want to get up and sing.
And so I started entering talent contests and I knew, I thought I might be good enough to actually do this.
So I'm just going to start going.
And little by little, I got good enough to where I could do it.
And at 18 years old, I decided not to go to college.
I had a four-year paid scholarship to Belmont University, which is literally outside my window.
Really good school.
My family doesn't come from money, so it wasn't like, you know, my dad could stroke big checks to a college.
So having it paid for was a really big deal.
But instead of going to college, I decided to go on the road with a bunch of guys I'd met who were from Texas who were a lot older than me and go play holiday in lounges, county rodeos, off-brand casinos from Vancouver to Jacksonville,, Florida and everywhere in between instead of going to college.
And the reason I did that was because I wanted to play the Grand Old Opry.
I wanted to write hit country songs and I wanted to be on country radio.
Those are my goals.
And I couldn't think of how college was going to help me get to that point.
And so I took that risk, jumped into it, and was probably too dumb to realize how big of a risk that actually was.
But it worked out.
That band became Lone Star.
That became a multiplatinum country act.
So I wrote my first number one when I was 21 years old.
You know, I still remember when I first learned about the Grand Old Opry.
And this was a Robin Williams live at the Mat.
He says, you know, he gets up and he says, Howdy?
And he's, whoop, strong Opera House.
And I was like, what does he, everyone seems to understand.
Right.
What he was talking about.
I had no idea.
I mean, Grendel Opry is the longest running radio show in the history of America.
It's still every Saturday night.
And that's like for a country singer, forget being a member of the Opry.
That would probably be the ultimate, ultimate.
But just to be good enough and recognized enough that the Opry would invite you to step onto their stage and sing anything is like a, it's just a giant pinnacle moment for any country singer, including me.
So I guess it happened.
It happened.
Yeah.
So Lone Star, we got a record deal.
I called my dad.
I said, You're not going to believe it.
We just got a record deal.
And he goes, No way.
I said, Yeah.
And so then I started writing songs full time, working on those records.
We were touring about two hundred days a year.
Two hundred days a year.
So that's sweat equity, right?
That's what it takes.
Well, you know, a lot of people in America that want to be a professional entertainer, they want to do it the easy way or they don't want to do it at all.
They want either to get discovered on YouTube, which is nothing wrong with that.
Or they want to go win American Idol Idol, nothing wrong with that either.
But the vast majority of people that not only make it, but have long careers, you don't want to just make it for five years and then that's it.
You want to make music the rest of your life if you really love it.
It's not a hobby.
Is they the ones that go out and play two hundred nights a year, year after year after year, getting sharper and better and better at not only singing and writing songs, but how to communicate to an audience, how to entertain people for real, how to condition your body and mind to work that hard.
Because once you get a record deal, the work doesn't stop.
It actually goes up from there.
From there, now you've got 250 major market radio stations that have to see you and have to meet you and have to go to lunch with you and then you have to convince them to play your music and go play free radio shows for them over and over all over the United States.
So it is a to really do it for real, it is a lifelong commitment.
And you do a lot more than that.
Make sure you're tired of hearing about it, don't it?
Yeah, you went, I'm tired just listening to that.
Yeah, no doubt.
I'm tired of remembering it.
You write music, you perform music, and you do a lot more than that.
And we're going to talk about all of it.
Do you remember the what?
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
How did that play out?
I don't care what any guy ever tells you, if it's any answer other than this, he's a liar.
The reason a guy picks up a guitar and writes a song is one reason, girls.
That's it.
Girls, that theme, many a country song I have heard involves that.
That's the whole impetus for figuring out how to play three or four chords is girls.
And so there was a girl and she was dating the football player.
I ain't big enough to be on the football team, you know, and I thought, how do I get this girl's attention?
So I wrote a song for her, put it on a cassette, because that's what we had back then, wrote the lyrics down, folded it up, stuck it in her locker.
And it worked.
And the football player wanted to whoop me all over the school and was not happy with me for the rest of my time there, but it worked.
And I got a date with that girl.
So yeah, that's girls is what sets that off.
But then I went, well, that worked.
Maybe I'll write another one.
So I wrote another one, and they weren't good.
But as I got into being around more senior musicians like the Lone Star guys, those guys actually could write songs, like actual really good songs that could be on the radio.
And then we got a record deal.
And upon that moment is when you now have a record deal, now you're a commodity, now you're a revenue stream for all the songwriters in Nashville.
If we can get a song on that Lone Star record, we get paid.
That's a big deal.
So I was able to sit in the room with the absolute giants, the Albert Einsteins of country songwriting.
Mark D. Sanders, Paul Nelson, Larry Boone, Don Cook, Chick Raines, Sharon Vaughn.
It was this list of writers that had written, you know, The Gambler.
My heroes have always been cowboys for Willie Nelson, like that level of songwriters were currently writing at that time.
And I'm like 20.
And I'm able to sit in a room as close as we are right now and walk in and write a song with them.
And that's where I learned how to really craft a song.
From every syllable in that song has to hit.
Everyone.
Just because it rhymes does not mean it's good.
And I learned all these lessons about how to really be a wordsmith with a song and make it stick.
Write a hit song.
And those people are all my mentors.
I mean, that crew of songwriters in my mind were the best that ever walked.
Thank you for tuning in to American Thought Leaders.
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And now back to the interview.
To the uninitiated, like myself and so forth, it's just there's just a few themes.
It seems like, and this is maybe you can tell me, right, the answer to this.
It seems like there's just a few basic things.
One of them is, I met a girl, didn't work out, right?
I mean, roughly.
That's loss.
I've heard a lot of those.
Yeah, so loss.
Yeah.
What's another theme?
Well, that's I met a girl and it did work out.
Right.
Love.
Right.
Fun.
Sadness.
sadness, populist, what's going on?
What's going on in the world?
And the song I've been listening to a whole bunch of your songs recently, and the one that really kind of struck me was Revelation.
Okay.
Connection with God also plays into this.
Of course.
Yeah, God plays into everything.
He doesn't play into into us, we play into him.
He's the boss.
So Revelation is a song that I'll put it to, I'll back up just a second.
If I still had a record deal, which I don't and wouldn't take one if it was offered to me, but if I did, which I did most of my life, the last five or six songs that I put out would never have been heard by a soul because they would have taken that recording and said, Nice song, John, what else do you got?
And they would own my voice and they own my likeness and they own all my recordings.
They would just shelve it.
You would never hear it.
And so a song like Revelation, writing that song post my involvement with the music industry, the timing of that was right on the money.
Because I could have written that song years, years before that.
Nobody would have heard it.
I write it on my own.
What are you giving up?
You're giving up the money of the industry.
You're giving up all the radio stations.
all that big push that you get from a major company.
You're giving that up, but what are you getting in return?
You're able to say what you want to say, exactly how you want to say it.
And one of the good things about tech, and most things I don't like about tech, but a good thing about tech is I don't need a record label now to get the word out about a new piece of music.
I can literally just load it up myself, tell everybody to check this out, and if they like the song, they'll go get it.
Four out of my last five songs that I've released independently have been the number one most downloaded songs on Apple Music.
Not in country music, all genres.
Yeah.
All genres.
And that's an achievement that is only generally possible if you have a major record deal.
But when you have millions of people out here that hear a song like Revelation, they go, Where did that come from?
Because I'm never going to hear that on the radio.
How do I get that?
They click it, they download that song, now they've got it.
That's the magic of it.
I would not go back if the biggest label, if Sony Records offered me all the money in the world and said, Come back.
I'd say, No, thank you.
Because your freedom of speech is invaluable.
And I get to express it freely these days.
Well, so this, I mean, it's remarkable.
I mean, you had really written your own ticket, right?
You were set.
And I mean, of course, this gave you the ability to say no thanks any more folks.
But tell me about that decision.
Well, Warner Brothers Records, which was the last major label I was on, started calling me into meetings because they didn't like something I, a comment that I made about a particular subject going on in America, going on in culture.
Or they didn't like the fact that I did an interview with this conservative guy, or that I went on this conservative network, or whatever.
And they started calling me in and saying, hey, you can't do say stuff like that anymore.
I said, well, yes, I can.
They go, no, you can't.
Because you are causing radio programmers to not play your music because they don't agree with you.
And they're going to start blackballing you, and they were off these radio stations.
And if we can't get you played, we can't sell your music.
And if we can't sell your music, we can't recoup all the money we've spent on you.
And this is a no-go.
So yes, you have to stop.
And I said, it's not going to happen.
And so after that back and forth of maybe a year or two, I was like, this ain't going to work.
And they went, yeah, this ain't going to work.
And we split ways.
Now at that point, me and Big Kenny of Big and Rich decided, well, we're not done.
We've got a lot more songs in us.
And so we just started our own record label, Big and Rich Records, hired our own promotion team, put our own money into it, and we scored four more top 10 singles on our own without a major record label.
So that's where I saw that it was possible.
What I'm doing now doesn't even involve country radio.
They're not even in the loop, which is interesting because online consumption of music is just dwarfs terrestrial radio.
Not even close.
And that's the position I'm in now.
Still a battle.
Every time I put out a new song, I need people like you to come over and ask me about it, you know, and let your audience hear about it.
So I rely on a lot of people to help me get the word out, and that's I'm grateful you came.
Can I get you to play a little bit of Revelation?
Sure.
Yeah.
What is it that struck you about the song so much?
If I can ask you, let me give the interview around.
What's the listener thing?
So what's it about?
The thing that struck me, I listened to a couple of songs.
The other one, Earth to God, feels to me more like something they would play at a Christian church, at a revivalist church or something like that.
With this song, the term that comes to my mind right now, as you ask me, and I'm getting shivers up my spine about it, is reverence.
I sensed deep reverence, which I appreciate.
Yeah, there is deep reverence in it.
And it is a subject basically about spiritual warfare that everything you see happening in the world is just a result, a physical manifestation of what's happening in the spirit.
That's what the song is about.
So if people haven't seen the video, I urge you to go watch it after you watch this interview.
But just look up John Rich Revelation, YouTube Rumble, anywhere, and you'll see it.
But it basically shows the devil coming out of the woods in a ball of fire.
and then it shows an angel coming down with a sword to battle him and I'm standing in between the two of them because humanity is what they're fighting over.
And this is laid out throughout the Bible, all the way from the Old Testament all the way to the end of the Bible, the New Testament, it talks about it over and over and over.
And I'd never heard a song about that.
And the way I saw the world going, this would have been a year and a half ago, I guess I wrote that song, was so tumultuous and so, so much evil walking right out into the spotlights with such arrogance that they no longer were hiding.
It's like, you can see it right there., there it is.
When you watch a Super Bowl half time show and there's satanic symbolism all over the stage and the artist looks like they're possessed as they were singing it and you realize the war that they're waging against humanity on behalf of their father, the devil, what about us?
What about the other side?
Somebody's going to say, somebody's going to acknowledge this is what's going on and even though a lot of us do acknowledge it, I hadn't heard a song about it.
Have you?
Have you ever heard another song like Revelation?
No, I mean, I haven't, and that's why that's the one that, that's the one I remember most.
I'll play a piece of it.
*music*
Dancing in the flames, the people cursed his name, bowed at the altar of the father of lies.
But there's a number to their days and all their evil ways.
The Lord's gonna turn away from all their cries.
Revelation.
I can feel it coming like a dark train running.
Running, get ready,'cause the king is coming.
The king is coming back again.
So you're a Johnny Cash fan.
Me too.
But that's probably also why I'm saying it.
It's probably now that you're saying it, it reminds me of it.
It's got some, especially later Johnny Cash.
Yeah.
You know, that song, when I go out and play concerts now, of all the songs I've had something to do with, by far, that is the one that people come up and say, mention to me.
Revelation, man, that song, wow, wow, wow, wow.
Because it's not even really a song.
I mean, yeah, it's musical, but what I did is I took what it says in the Bible about this situation, just made it rhyme.
There's none of my opinion in the song.
There's none of my perspective in the song.
It's what John, the disciple, apostle, prophet John wrote in the book of Revelation.
I made it into a song.
Well, I was going to say it, so it does have to rhyme in the end.
What has to rhyme to be a song?
Yes, but none of the statements made in the song are my statements.
That's what makes it different.
Oh, I mean, that's fascinating.
You know, you've you've written something to the tune of two thousand songs.
Right.
I mean, that's a that's a quite prolific repertoire.
If you figure an average song takes about ten hours to write, eight to ten hours, and multiply that by over two thousand, that's a lot of that's a lot of time spent writing songs.
But, you know, out of those two thousand plus, I've had 218 of them recorded by major artists.
So I'm batting about ten percent.
How many of them do you actually perform?
Of the 218, Probably 60 or 70 of those.
That's amazing.
But then a lot of other artists started coming in.
You know, when I was writing 150 plus songs a year for many, many years.
And once big and rich music got popular, everybody started calling going, hey, do you have more songs like that?
I go, I got a whole catalog of songs like that that nobody's cared about for a long time.
Here you go.
Here's 50 of them.
And then, so for instance, Jason Alvine, he's a huge country artist, massive, plays football stadiums.
Jason Alvine, before he had ever got a record deal, heard some of my songs, came to me and said, I really like your songs, man.
If I ever get a record deal, I'd love to record a bunch of them.
I said, man, go get yourself a record deal, you know?
And he did.
So on Alvine's first record, seven out of his ten songs, I was a writer on those songs.
The whole, almost the whole first record.
Same thing with Gretchen Wilson, who wound up selling, you know, ten million plus records.
So those songs were written when my phone was not ringing.
Those songs were written when I had no deal, when I was damaged goods in the industry.
And I've told people this many times in speaking engagements and when I'm meeting with people, I say, listen.
Listen, when things are completely out of your control, things are happening in your life that are out of your control, you cannot stop it.
You got to find something that you still can control, as simple as it may be, and control it well.
I said, that could be what you're eating every day.
It could be how many phone calls am I going to make today to try to get a new job?
It could be how many miles am I going to walk?
Whatever it is, how many push-ups can I do today?
For me, it was pencil, paper, and a guitar.
I still have that.
I can control that.
And so I dove all the way into that and started writing just massive amount of songs where nobody cared about them.
For all I knew nobody'd ever hear these songs because nobody gave a damn about them at that point, I can promise you that.
But four or five years down the road, Big and Rich takes off and now the whole town, every producer in town, every artist is calling and they started cutting them.
That's remarkable.
Yep.
You got to cut firewood before the winter hits, right?
It's like the verse in Proverbs about the ant.
It says the ant goes out and stores its food up in the summer.
Because when the winter hits, there ain't no food to store up.
So I've always kind of had that attitude.
When things are down, that's when you make your bones right there.
That's when you stack up, preparing for success in the future.
So you said Revelations is, you know, basically not your words.
You just made them rhyme.
Is there a particular song that really is your words that is really the quintessential John Rich?
I mean, most of them.
Yeah.
Revelation is a different, is a different animal altogether.
But is there one?
Like, I mean, Earth to God.
You mentioned that song earlier.
That song actually is being sung in churches all over the US.
I get videos all the time from people.
They'll go, look, this lady sang your song in our church last Sunday.
And I'll look at the video and go, wow, I can't even believe it, and this whole congregation knows the words to it.
Never been on a country radio station, but it has made its way into tens of millions of people.
That song was written in 2020.
So you had in 2020, 2021, where you had the COVID lockdowns, and then here come the vaccination mandates, and then here come people burning our cities down, all across the US.
It was horrible.
And I look out the window and I go, I had this picture in my head of like an old world war soldiers sitting at one of those CB radios.
Remember the old ones where it kind of comes up and the microphone's up here and it's got a button on it?
And it's got a button on it.
I had this picture of an old man sitting behind this microphone, pressing the button going, Earth to God, come in God, like hailing God.
Because the whole planet is on fire.
There's a pandemic going on.
I mean, everything's upside down.
And I thought, that would be a good song to write, Earth to God, come in God.
Because what does Earth want to hear God say back?
This is God, come back Earth.
And I had that thought and went, that is, that is a massive thought.
It's so simple.
Which again is another tenet of country music songwriting is the simpler the better.
Nail that line, stick everything, build everything around that very simple thought, and you've got a song that'll stick.
And so I wrote Earth to God and put it out, and I think it really helped a lot of people to hear that.
In the interviews I did around that, I said, listen, he's literally right there.
You feel like the whole world is burning down?
It is, but he can see that, and he can see you, and all you have to do is go, Can I talk to you for a minute?
And he'll go, Yep, I thought you'd never ask.
That's what that song is all about.
I've had that moment in my life.
You've had these moments where you were, well, I don't know, you're, you'd say probably you're at the top of your game now, right?
I don't know.
I feel I mean, I feel like I'm doing all right.
Yeah.
I mean, it depends on what game.
Well, so, you know, when big and rich really kind of, you know, yeah.
I was at the top of the game then too.
You were, I don't know, you won Celebrity Apprentice back then, it was a big deal.
Many people knew who you were.
Yeah.
How did you how did you deal with the fame?
Not very well.
I had a horrible gambling problem.
I love blackjack.
I'm really good at it.
I was pulling ungodly amounts of money off tables all over the US and then you'd play more and more and more and more.
That's a real thing, by the way.
Gambling addiction, that's for real.
Very hot temper, very arrogant.
You can look me up and see where I got thrown off of airplanes.
You can look me up and see where I was in multiple fistfights in one night in Los Angeles, California.
I mean, just absolute, just full-out rock and roll out here.
at some point you realize I'm the gambling thing, I went and knocked a table out in Tunica, Mississippi, just clobbered this table.
Tens of thousands of dollars.
that I won.
And got back here to Nashville and I'm looking at all that money and I went, I just felt like he was telling me, that is the most disrespectful thing you could ever do with what I gave you.
Because I didn't grow up with money.
We didn't grow up starving.
We had what we needed, but you didn't have extra money laying around.
And I felt like he was going, Can you imagine what your dad could have done with that money?
Like that's what he was putting in my head.
And I felt so guilty over living like that and mistreating and disrespecting what God had given me that I'm going to go out here and throw this down on a stupid blackjack table.
That was it.
I never played another hand of cards since then and that was twenty ten.
twenty ten.
And I have played a lot of places, thousands, where I could go play cards whenever I wanted.
I refuse.
I will never play cards again.
It was absolute cold turkey, full stop.
And that was the beginning of me starting to come back around and hearing him again what he wanted me to actually do.
Well, that's this is what I was thinking about as you were saying that, you know, you actually you listened and you listened hard, it seems at that time.
Well, if you're lucky, God will only knock your teeth out.
If you're unlucky, he'll knock your brains out.
And I was lucky that he only knocked my teeth out.
And he did several times, knocked me down hard, various ways, because I think he cares about me.
I know he does, and he wants to see me go do what it is I'm supposed to do, and that ain't it.
It's kind of like, so we call God, he's the father.
He's your father.
Okay, well, I'm a father.
I have two sons, and if one of my sons is playing football out in the street, and I say, Hey, don't play football in the street, and I grab the football and go, get back in here, get back in the yard street, you'll get hit by a car.
And the very next day, he's out there playing football again.
Well, the punishment goes up and up and up.
And I'm doing that because I don't want my son to get hit by a car.
Because I want him to live his life out and become an old man someday and do what he's supposed to do, not die at nine or ten years old playing football in the street.
So eventually, if they won't listen, the punishments get worse and worse and more aggressive and drastic to try to break them, break their will of doing something that's going to hurt them.
And so that's how I look at my sons as a dad.
Well, if we're created in God's image, that means he thinks like we think, he's just perfect at it.
We're very imperfect at it.
We're very imperfect.
But it's the same thought process that He has towards us.
So when I look back on the punishments over the years and the come to Jesus moments, I go, Thanks for not taking me out.
Thanks for not just erasing me.
Thanks for only knocking a few molars out here and there and then fixing me back up.
That's quite a thing to say, probably on an interview.
You're not going to really hear preachers talk like that, but that's really how it works.
Well, you know, it speaks to my own experience quite a bit.
Because I think I think probably I was somewhere in between getting the teeth knocked out and the brains knocked out.
And it was a really rough time in my life, but it ended, when I look back, and I mean this sincerely, the best thing that ever happened to me.
Sure.
It shifted.
It shifted the trajectory in a really good way.
It saved you from wasting the rest of your life, whatever that was going to be.
100%.
I mean, look at Paul in the New Testament.
I mean, so Paul was Saul, and Saul's whole job was working for the Romans, tracking down Christians and cutting their heads off.
Like Roman candles, we get those on the 4th of July.
That was actually a thing.
That came from back then, when they take Christians, they bury them up to their neck, dump tar on their head and set them in fire.
They call that a Roman candle.
So Saul's whole job was to do that.
I mean, he was just vicious.
And on the road to Damascus, God knocked all his teeth out, smacked him so hard that that was his last shot and blinded him.
We all know the story about the road to Damascus.
And when Paul came to and could see again and hear again and think again, he went from Saul to Paul.
And then he wrote half the New Testament after that.
So that's how he operates.
And so it's our job when he smacks you hard enough, you better listen, because I think it's a finite amount of times that he will give you those chances to turn around.
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more about, like, the, I don't know, the fun.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
I mean, I'm just thinking of the song, Offended.
I'm offended, you're offended.
Let's all get offended tonight.
Yeah.
Another song about, much more lighthearted, but yeah, all about just how ridiculous I found it to be that Americans were just literally offended and up in arms and, you know, horrified by any little thing that someone would say or do or that would happen.
And I remember, man, when I was growinging up, Archie Bunker was on TV, George Jefferson was on TV, right?
And George Jefferson and Archie Bunker meeting up with each other and what they would say to each other and everybody laughs at that because it's funny because they didn't hate each other, they were neighbors, but George, like, I don't know if I like you'cause you're black and he's going, I don't know if I like you'cause you're white, but they still had dinner together and hung out and it was a, it was a microcosm of America at that time and nobody got offended and nobody had a protest and nobody did anything.
They just went, yeah, well, that's how a lot of people are those days back then.
So today just fast forward up, it's somebody's waving an American flag and you're a Nazi.
And on the other side, somebody's burning flags.
Somebody, you know, they're going, they're now taking it to these extremes.
And so I wrote this silly song called I'm Offended.
I'm offended that you're offended.
Let's all get offended tonight.
I'll order us a beer.
We can sit down right here and scream and yell and cuss and fuss and fight.
Doo doo doo doo doo.
And it's like this goofball song that actually makes a pretty serious point.
Can I get you to give me a little bit of that guitar?
Let's see.
Because you were, you just gave it to me without.
It seems like these days, no matter what you say, someone's losing their ever loving mind.
It's like they're looking for a reason to have their fragile feelings hurt every single time.
My country truck, I gass it up.
You got your fancy Tesla hooked up to a plug.
I know you're mad.
You think I'm bad.
Cause I'm breathing free at last and you're still stuck behind your mask and I'm offended.
You're offended.
Let's all get offended tonight.
I order us a beer, we can sit down right here and scream and yell and cuss and fuss and fine.
Right?
It's fantastic.
Punct on.
And, you know, there's a there's a moment in the music video where, you know, the guys I think I expect the guys are going to fight, but they don't.
They just kind of They they end up they kind of make a fight.
They click their beers, yeah.
Yeah, the video is hilarious.
All these girls getting into a fight.
You have girls with like nose rings and purple hair, and then country girls with cowboy hats and ball caps.
They get into a fight.
Mike Lindell walks in with a referee's uniform, blowing a whistle and throwing a flag.
Like, I mean, I basically just mocked the whole culture.
of offensive culture, I just mocked it.
And people really liked it.
Gave everybody a good laugh.
You have quite a bit of range, you know, all the way from putting the Bible to song to something like this.
Well, country music is a reflection of life, and life is the complete range.
That's what I love about country music.
You can literally write about any subject you want.
That's different than pop.
That's different than a lot of other genres where country music is life put to paper.
And so, yeah, sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's sad, sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's mess making fun of something like I'm offended.
And that's what I love about it.
I can write anything I want.
Well, so before I ask you about the next song, which I have on my mind right now, is one that you're just about to launch, why do you think the devil figures into country music songwriting as much as he does?
It makes me I've heard that in a number of the songwriting.
The devil went down to Georgia, Chelsea Daniels.
There you go.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's probably the best example.
Exactly.
But it's, but it's, there's multiple examples.
It's not just a common.
You're right.
Why?
Why is that?
I think country music.
of all the American genres of music is rooted in gospel music to a large degree, bluegrass music, which was also very gospel and Christian in its nature.
Those, those forms of American music are what really combined and became country music.
So there's, you know, there's a lot of gospel still in country music.
I mean, Carrie Underwood's first single was Jesus Take the Wheel, first song she ever put out.
Jesus Take the Wheel.
People that make country music for a living, not all of them, but many of us grew up singing in church.
We've been around that gospel church environment or had members of our family that were devout Christians, people that we knew and were raised around.
And that becomes part of your DNA.
And so when you sit down and write a song in country music like Charlie Daniels, he's going to write a song called The Devil Went Down to Georgia and I whipped his ass.
That's the song.
The Devil Went Down to Georgia and I beat him.
He challenged me to a fiddle contest and I whipped the devil, right?
And people love that.
They go, Yeah, he whipped the devil.
Good for Charlie Daniels.
You know, so I think that's the reason why it comes in.
In pop music and rap and a lot of other genres when they talk about about the devil, they talk about him in a very loving sort of way.
So I don't know those genres that well, but is that really the case?
Music is a very powerful weapon for good and bad.
I mean, music is interesting because you can say something to somebody and they'll hear you, but if you put the same exact message and put a melody around it and a rhythm around it and then present it that way, what happens then?
Do you ever catch yourself reciting a speech in your head over and over and over?
Do you wake up in the morning hearing something Ronald Reagan said in your head over and over or anyone else?
No.
You wake up in the morning and a song is stuck in your head.
Or you're driving your car and there's a song stuck in my head.
Like music is very powerful.
I don't know the spiritual elements of it, but it's able to bypass the physical and get right into the soul of someone.
And so when that's used at the behest of wickedness and wicked people, it goes into their soul like that.
When it's used as a good thing with a good message or God's message or whatever, it does exactly the same thing.
It goes right into one in the same way.
So there's a war that goes on.
Music.
The devil loves to use music as a weapon.
So in here lies the battle.
You know, you've been on this mission to stop a methane plant from being put in place in a middle of a residential and farm area and so forth.
And it seems like you won.
Yeah.
So it's the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which a lot of people think just is Tennessee.
It's actually seven states that they're in.
It was founded in 1933 by our most famous socialist president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put that into gear.
And the way he built the TVA was that they only answered to the President of the United States.
They don't answer to governors.
They don't answer to zoning boards.
They don't answer to senators.
They don't answer to anybody except the President of the United States.
And it's still that way today, since 1933.
So because they have this crazy setup, they don't have to adhere to things like the Fourth Amendment, right?
So illegal search and seizure.
you know, probable cause and a warrant.
Well, so let me just come on your line.
TVA is typically portrayed as a company that the government owns, but mostly just functions like a private company.
It functions like a private company with protection on a federal level, which means it does not have to adhere to all kinds of things.
So here's what happened.
So there's a little county about 25 miles in that direction called Cheetham County, Tennessee.
My dad has a blueberry farm in Cheetham County, a small one like a micro farm.
My brother also has a small farm there.
I finished high school in that county or went there three years of high school, nineteenth and eleventh.
My granny rich, my papa rich, they they they lived there till they died in that county.
I still have some some land out there in Cheetham County.
I know it very well.
And my brother, the farmer, tells me one day about six months ago, have you seen what the TVA is trying to do to Cheatham County?
It's a nine hundred megawatt methane gas plant with ten acres of lithium battery storage.
And my brother says the lithium batteries they're talking about are the size of an eighteen wheeler trailer each.
They want ten acres of those.
I said, Where are they wanting to put this?
He tells me the address where it's going.
I went, Are you kidding me?
I said, There's like five hundred houses.
Like that's right on top of neighborhoods.
I said, Aren't there like three schools right there?
He goes, There's five schools within five miles of where this is going in.
And he said, and the main water supply to Assen City and Pleasant View, which are the two towns in that county, they're literally going to go right through that and run their gas pipelines under the water source and tear up about 6,000 acres of farmland.
I said, what?
I just could not believe it.
He said, yeah, and even worse than that, he said, they're showing up with bulletproof vests and loaded weapons on farmers' properties and demanding access to their property.
I said, the TVA has a task force?
He said, yeah, they look like the ATF when they come walking up on your property.
I said, okay.
Can you connect me to somebody who has encountered this?
Because I want to hear this firsthand.
He goes, yeah, I'll hook you up with some guys.
So I started going out and doing interviews with people on their front porches.
And this one piece of video that I saw, which you will see in my music video, which led to the writing of the song we're talking about, The Devil and the TVA, was an 88-year-old woman named Mrs. Nicholson, who suffers from dementia.
And the TVA pulled up on her farm.
She's been living.
That land has been in her family over a century.
It's called a century farm.
They pull up on her property, twelve vehicles deep.
People get out of the cars, bulletproof vests, loaded weapons.
I mean, it looks like it looks like a drug raid.
And this lady's going, who are all these people?
And it's on video because the neighbor ran out the door with a video camera to try to capture this.
Thank God.
Who are all these people?
What is going on?
What is happening?
The neighbors come up and go, Miss Nicholson, that's the TVA and they pull out an iPhone.
They go, They're wanting to put they're wanting to build this on your farm and they show her a picture of like a plant and transmission lines.
And for about ten seconds, that old woman snapped out of her dementia and looked right into the camera that the neighbor had there and said, You think you own something, you don't own anything.
Just like that.
It's powerful.
And I went, oh my.
I mean, that was like, that encapsulated the entire situation to me.
Upon seeing that video and realizing, yeah, this is real.
There's the evidence right there on top of the first-hand accounts I'm getting from all these people.
I decided, you know what?
TVA's worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but I've got an iPhone and a selfie stick.
Let's see how they deal with what I can do to them with my iPhone and my selfie stick.
So I started interviewing people, kind of like what you would do.
almost investigative journalist style and started posting them on my ex account at John Rich.
You look up and they're racking up millions of views on each one of these neighbors of me talking to them, which then gets on the radar of TVA in a major way because I'm tagging them every single time, those scoundrels.
And that leads to a congressman calling me and saying, Hey, the senior vice president of government relations for the TVA reached out to me and said he would like to come to your house and have a chat with you.
I said, Oh, would he now?
Well, you tell him to come on over.
So he came to this exact room, sat with me back in the back back of this room for less than thirty minutes and I told him, get the hell out of our county.
You got two weeks.
If you don't get out of our county, I'm going to write a song about the TVA that compares you to the devil himself, and I'm going to have millions of Americans singing a song comparing you guys to the devil, and you'll never be the same.
You got two weeks.
That's the basic point of the meeting.
And he didn't.
They didn't back out.
So I wrote the song.
Now eventually, I know you've got the questions, but eventually, this gets on the radar of Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture.
She blind calls me.
I didn't know her.
She got my phone number from Pam Bondi.
Said, I got your number from Pam.
I hope you don't mind.
I said, no, yes, ma'am.
What's going on?
How much farmland is this going to tear up?
It's about 6,000 acres.
You got a map, yeah?
Showed her the map.
She went, yeah, that's that comes under my jurisdiction.
So then she weighed in.
And then ultimately Trump weighed in and said, yeah, you're not building this.
And so it's the first time on record that I can find where a populist movement was able to shove the TVA out of a county.
Maybe it's happened before.
This is the only one I'm aware of.
This is curious because there are other options for the location of the methane plant.
A methane plant is not in itself a problem.
No, the county was giving them another option, right?
They have an industrial section where it could have gone.
There's places in West Tennessee that Obama tore down all the big giant coal plant that's just sitting there that already has pipelines running to Nashville, and those counties are completely devastated because Obama destroyed what was driving those two counties.
TVA owns all that land.
Why don't you just build it over there?
You've already got a pipeline running, you've already got transmission lines running.
Another question they won't answer, right?
So you're dealing with an entity that is federal and private and they only answer to the President of the United States, which means we don't answer to anybody.
We don't answer to the citizens, especially they don't answer to the citizens.
Nobody.
I had senators, one in particular, that's been in office a very long time, very powerful, and said, I had been begging them to abandon this project for months.
I said, well, what do they say?
It's like, basically just flip me the bird and say, get out of here.
You don't have any jurisdiction with us.
So here's the question.
Should there be any entity in America that can operate like that?
Should there be?
Well, I think most people would probably say no.
Anybody other than the TVA would say no.
Right.
So other I've learned a lot since I've gone through this process of taking them on.
There's other big energy companies.
For instance, Duke Energy is a massive energy company.
Duke Energy, if they want to build a plant somewhere, they have to sit in front of the zoning board of the county.
And the zoning board is made by who?
People that were elected by the people that live in that county to serve in the zoning board.
And the zoning board knows that if they let TVA come in and destroy six thousand acres of farmland, they're not going to get re-elected.
Matter of fact, they're going to be the most unpopular people in the county.
So what's the zoning board probably going to say to Duke Energy if they try to do that.
Yep, you can't build it there.
You can build it here.
We're good with that.
And Duke Energy has to say, okay, we'll go build it over there.
We won't build it at all.
But TVA doesn't have to do that.
They don't even sit in front of the zoning board.
Trump was not happy at all about any of this situation.
And that was borne out by the fact that he's now fired the TVA board and bringing in a new board.
And I'm hoping with the new board, with this song coming out, that it raises your awareness enough that maybe we can get their charter changed where they have to treat people different in this country.
So, and so you won.
And I guess the song's still coming out.
Song's still I made the man a deal.
I made him a promise.
I said, Get out of our county in two weeks or I'm going to write a song that compares you to the devil.
I thought he thought I was kidding.
I think he thought I was kidding.
You're going to give me a little bit of a.
You want to hear a piece of the devil in the TVA?
A little bit of the song.
So, yeah, I'd love to.
Thank you.
The first line in the chorus is Miss Nicholson's phrase.
You think you own something but you don't own anything.
And I'll tell you what it that made me think of when I saw it.
It's very powerful.
I agree what she said.
And speak, you know, but go ahead and I'll I'll share with you after.
Okay.
What struck me.
First verse and chorus of the Devil in the TVA.
I will congratulate the people of Cheatham County that stood up and pushed with me on this thing and Secretary Rollins and the President of the United States.
What a story.
And misses Nicholson especially.
I appreciate her having the boldness to make a statement like that.
It goes like this.
For a hundred some odd years, families worked the same old fields, raised their kids and grandkids right there on that land.
saw the storms flood their ground.
watch their crops die in the drought, stare the great depression down and never ran.
But now they're looking at one hell of a fight, trying to save the family name from a rich man's bottom line.
You think you own something, but you don't own nothing when the government man comes around, puts his dirty old boots on your ground, laughs at your brother, with a gun and a bulletproof vest.
And he don't care what you have to say, he's just gonna do it anyway.
And he'll smile and grin and then take your farm away.
And he'll tear it all to hell right in your face.
Now the devil ain't got nothing on the TV.
Got nothing on the TV.
And it goes on from there.
If people want it, they can download it, go get it.
I mean, listen, it's like this is still going on.
I mean, TVA's doing this across seven states, there are counties right now in the shape this county was just in, and it needs to change.
So thanks for letting me sing a piece of it.
You know, and that line from Miss Nichols, I was recently in Montpellier, James home of James Madison, and he has this line where, a quote where he says, Conscience is the most, it's the supreme form of property, actually.
And it's very, very powerful.
And I was looking at it, I was trying to kind of understand it.
And then it got me thinking about how central private property is actually to freedom.
Yeah, landowners.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of people moved to this country because they were told, you can own land here.
You can own it.
Not the king won't own it.
You own it.
You come out here and develop this land, homestead this land, you can actually own land in America.
And they went, let's go.
And you exercise agency over that.
And we just don't think about these things because we've had them for so many years, right, in these liberal democracies, right?
And this is not something she bought last year.
Been in her family for over a century.
And here's men with guns and bulletproof vests telling her that they're coming on her property to tear it all to smithereens, then condemn it, then offer her 10 cents on the dollar.
Get out.
There's nothing American about that at all.
And I'm really grateful to President Trump, Secretary Rollins, who felt the exact same way.
And I hope this new board that comes in, I'm actually petitioning the president right now to give me a presidentially appointed position as a citizen advocate.
Where when I find egregious things going on like what happened in Cheetham County, I can go to him first and explain to him the situation, have a remedy for the situation.
And if he agrees, have him sign off on it and then go to that place, whether it's a TVA or whoever, and say, the president would like to see this happen and drop it on their desk and see if we can throw a shield up around the American citizens.
I understand things have to be built, but there's a right way and a wrong way to deal with citizens.
You don't step on their constitutional rights and take American property from an American landowner.
And there's a precedent for this.
I mean, for example, in the FDA, there's all citizen advocates on any of those panel reports, right?
Right.
Right.
There is a precedent for it.
Yeah.
I've heard the word ombudsman used.
And I said, yeah, it's kind of like that, except I would be more proactive.
You know what I mean?
Like, I like the position I'm in these days.
I've been asked to run for governor of this state.
I've been asked to run for District 7 in Congress.
I've been asked to run for Senate seats, all mayor, all kinds of things.
All the time I get asked.
And I say, it does not interest me.
Number one, I don't want to spend my life hanging around politicians.
That's number one.
But number two, where can I be the most effective?
Because the people I really care about that are getting beat up out here, they don't live in just one district or one state or one place.
It's happening to people all over the place.
You know, I come from blue collar Texas.
I come from I'm a high school graduate.
You know, I mean, I'm just a regular guy that has done irregular things in my life, but my brain still works like that and those are my people and I identify with those people.
I know how they think.
I know where they came from.
I know what their daily life is like.
I know what they care about.
I know what they don't like.
Those are my relatives.
My American relatives is how I look at them.
So I'm asking the president, and I hope he gives it to me, make me a presidentially appointed citizen advocate.
Wouldn't that be a cool thing?
I think they're blessed to have you here.
Well, I'd be happy to serve in that position.
So we both know Cash Patel.
And I remember he told me a while back that he was a country music guy, which was kind of shocking to me, you know, an Indian guy from Long Island is not the immediate person you imagine as being the country music fan.
It goes to show how little I know, right?
And he was thrilled to discover at one point that he had a fan in you.
And I just wanted you to tell me, like, how did you find out that he was a fan of you?
I want you to tell me, like, how that, how you guys actually connected and how that looked, how that moment looked.
So I had followed Cash for a little while, probably started around the 2020 era with the election and COVID and all that stuff.
I was watching Devin Nunez and then I heard him mention Cash Patel and I went, Who's Cash Patel?
And then I started seeing Cash pop up, mainly on Rumble at that point.
And I went, This guy's scrappy.
I like this guy.
I identify with that attitude all day long.
So I then I started following him.
Then True Social came around.
So I followed Cash Patel on True Social.
And then he followed me.
I went, okay, maybe he's a country music fan.
I don't know.
I talked to Devin Nunez and I said, I'd love to meet Cash one day.
That'd be great.
He goes, you know what?
We'll come to Nashville and let's do something at your house.
I said, that'd be great.
What do you want to do?
He goes, you know, how about like a True Social Rumble party at your house?
Like, just bring all the influencers from True Social and Rumble to your house.
Maybe you could jump up and play a song.
I said, yeah, that'd be great.
So as we're planning that out, Cash is then writing his book, The Plot Against the King.
And at this point, now we're connected and Cash says, I need a theme song for this book.
Can you write a theme song about the Plot Against the King.
And so I got online because it's still we're on lockdowns at this point.
Got online with a couple of other big songwriters, Vicki McGheehy and Jeffrey Steele, and we wrote a song called The Plot Against the King.
And then when they all came here, Cash was standing right behind me on that stage singing, which he's not a very good singer, and he'll tell you that.
But that wasn't the point.
And we're all up there singing The Plot Against the King here at the house.
He's since then become an actual friend of mine.
So we don't talk all the time.
He's a pretty busy guy.
But every week or two, we'll text each other.
How's it going?
What's happening?
You know, and hang in there.
You know, I can't even imagine what him and Bon Gino have learned since they've had those jobs.
Dan's another guy I've known for a very long time.
So he's always had a lot of respect for Cash and his unwillingness to back off.
He just wouldn't back up off anybody and took a beating over that.
Even the J-6 prisoners and the situation around that, he wouldn't back up off of that.
Never left people hanging and just seems like what a real American ought to act like that wants to save his country.
You know, this kind of segue, I mean, you've been very generous with your time and I think we're going to need to finish up shortly, but you know, it' sort of segues really well into the last thing I wanted to talk about with you, which is, you know, was listening to the song The Man.
Build on that a little bit more, you know, the man you want to be.
You know, so what is in the future for John Rich beyond being an omnispice person or omnispice man?
Right.
I think at this point, you know, I spent many years of my life serving, serving myself.
Decades living that way.
And so now I look at what, hopefully, I get to live another fifty years.
That'd be great.
But whatever that amount of time is, is I want it to be used having as much impact as I can possibly have on behalf of people that cannot get that impact for themselves and saying things that are true.
Say things that are true and don't run away from evil people because they're scary looking.
Things like that.
Like Sean Combs.
Like the music industry.
Like people that come for our kids.
Like people that put obscene material in front of little kids or people that target kids online.
People that
Probably the most aggressive thing Jesus Christ ever said, at least ever said that was written down was he was sitting with his disciples and there was a bunch of kids playing around and stuff and he pointed at one of the kids and acknowledged the kid and he says you'd be better off to have a millstone tied around your neck than to ever cause one of these little ones to stumble is the word he used.
To stumble.
Not to abduct them, not to kill them, not to abuse them, to cause them to stumble, meaning to mess with them at all in their state of innocence.
You would be better off to die than that happened, than you be that person that messes with one of these.
That's what Son of God said that?
Okay, I want to pay attention to that one because in this country we know right now there's hundreds of thousands of kids.
We don't know where they are.
We know that there especially during the pandemic child abuse went absolutely through the roof because teachers a lot of times are the ones that see the bruise on the kid's arm or walking with a limp.
And the teacher will say, hey, what happened to you, Bobby?
What happened to you, Sally?
Oh, my dad threw me down the stairs and they could call in a report and get that kid out of that bad situation.
When COVID hit and they shut down all the schools, you don't see that anymore.
So abuse went through the roof.
There's all kinds of adults walking around this country that were abused as kids and it never was dealt with.
And they then become abusers themselves and on and on and on.
I look at child abuse in this country as the number one issue.
Number one.
Because God is never going to bless America as long as we allow this stuff to exist.
So as far as how I want to spend the rest of my time, it is charging.
straight at them on whatever subject that may be of people that are evil-minded and are working against God's will.
And especially if they're coming after kids.
I want to be the guy, one of them.
There's others out there, but I want to be known as one of them.
And I've got one of these.
That's kind of what gives me a little bit of a different edge is music is my weapon of choice.
Music, not being a politician.
Music.
That's how I want to be known.
You know, you just reminded me of something I was going to ask earlier in the interview when we were talking about Revelation.
And that's you reminded me and you reminded me again of this line from Alexander Sulsahitzin, where he says, you know, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
And, you know, the implication being, you know, you have to choose.
Right.
Right.
That's, well, that's very true.
I mean, that's been, and that's been borne out through many stories of many, many people throughout history.
Even in the Bible, that's borne out.
I mean, King David, who God referred to as a man after my own heart, at one point in his life, put Uriah on the front lines to make sure he died in battle so David could steal his wife, Bathsheba.
That's pretty bad.
So that was an evil side of David's heart, that was straight up evil.
Then on the other side, David ran straight at Goliath when nobody else would knock him down and cut his head off with his own sword.
You know, so that statement is absolutely spot on.
And human beings, let's cap it with this.
Human beings are not capable of not being evil unless they have God in them.
The only way you're not an evil individual because it's all in you.
You are sin.
You're born into sin.
Is that you got to ask Jesus Christ to become the Lord of your life and turn your life over to him, then he comes in and then he overrides.
those evil intuitions.
Then you do what He wants you to do.
You carry out His will, not the will of the wicked.
That's it.
That's the only reason I'm not a bad guy.
Because I'd be a nasty bad guy.
Instead, I'm a nasty good guy.
I want to be a good guy and have impact.
When you know where you're going when you die, that gives you a lot of confidence to run straight at him.
Because what are you going to do to me?
What's the worst thing you can do?
Kill me, right?
Kill somebody.
And what happens then?
I mean, don's going to be the best day of your life.
So I view it that way.
I think anything less than that attitude is probably not going to win the fight.
Well, John Rich, it's such a pleasure to have had you on the show.
You appreciate you coming to the house.
I've followed your organization a long time and I'm still learning more about it even as of today as we were talking off camera.
So you guys keep up the great work.
You're very important to American culture, what you guys are doing.
Thank you so much.
Yes sir, thank you.
This room here, this is kind of where I write a lot of the songs.
The man, like what?
What is that about?
So the song The Man is a song I wrote about a month after my granddaddy died.
World War II vet, he suffered multiple Purple Hearts.
So when he died, I thought, man, I gotta write a song about him.
So a month later, I wrote The Man.
It is the history of his service in World War II in a song.
but it's actually become kind of a calling card song for all kinds of vets and even active duty.
Well he stormed a lot of beaches, slept in jungles with the leeches.
He saw things a young man should never see.
So this wall is made up of all retired guitars of mine.
So at the very end, that was my very first one, I told you my dad gave me a little kid guitar to learn on.
That's it.
Yeah.
1979, I was five years old.
This is really where we sit on and write.
So this whole thing up here is a collection of lyrics.
So we talked about, for instance, The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
So I would ask friends of mine like Charlie Daniels, hey, can you write down the words to The Devil Went Down to Georgia?
Look how many words in that song.
It probably took him two hours to write that.
But he wrote it, signed it, dated it.
I've got like Lee Greenwood's God Bless USA is up there and just all kinds of country songs that I personally like.
When I write, I like to sit in here with those lyrics on the wall because it makes me understand I might be a pretty good songwriter, but I haven't written that one yet.
I haven't written God Bless the USA yet.
Like there's still higher ranks to go on the creative side in writing songs.
And I try not to compare myself to who I'm competing with today.
I go, no, I'm competing with Johnny Cash.
And as long as you're competing with Johnny Cash, you'll never stop pushing because you're never going to beat him.
Stuff like that's my Granny Rich's sewing machine, 1910.
She ran her own business, so she was 808 by herself as an alterations expert and she'd have her ashtray sitting there and she'd smoke Marlboro Reds and fix people's clothes and you know when she was in her late 80s I said granny why are you still working 30 40 hours a week and she'd get offended by that question she'd go why am I still working I go yeah she goes because I can and that's what you're supposed to do when you live in this country that's
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