Screenshot of Lee Greenwood at the RNC.
The country singer Lee Greenwood was born three weeks before Joe Biden. A self-styled evangelical Christian Republican, Greenwood is a wiry octogenarian, well-spoken and exuding a fiery intelligence. At 81, he pursues a performing schedule that would exhaust many a crooner or candidate half his age.
It his piercing tenor voice, aided by electronic amplification and spiritual fervor, that presents the most politically potent threat to Democratic hopes in November. For those listening to the ardent strains of his patriotic anthem “God Bless the U. S. A.” on the first night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, Greenwood’s crusading chorus hit like a sonic airstrike that blew to smithereens what’s left of the already wrecked border Wall separating Church and State. Monday’s processional sounded a lot like the funeral dirge of Democracy
Greenwood had not been slated to appear at the convention, but after Saturday’s failed assassination attempted in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign set the singer a Higher Calling than concerts at casinos and evangelical conclaves. Greenwood immediately changed his schedule and rushed to the Brew City.
On Trump’s arrival in the convention auditorium so soon after Saturday’s shooting the zealots may have been thinking of the Resurrection, but the event was staged more like Jesus’s pre-Crucifixion entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday riding on donkey. I half-expected Trump to be hoisted onto an emaciated Democratic ass and festooned with palm fronds droned up from Mar-a-Lago. Trump is supremely adept at self-anointing, has been probably from the time he was a toddler. “I was saved by the grace of God,” Trump confirmed in the hours between getting shot and coming to Milwaukee: “It was God alone that prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
Unlike in the Roman Coliseum, hungry lions did not await him in the Fiserv arena, but the rabid MAGA faithful instead.
His triumphant entry needed music. That music had to be “God Bless the U. S. A.”
Greenwood released his most famous tune in May of 1984 and it shot into the top 10 on the country charts. It was rapidly deployed a few weeks later at the Republican National Convention for a re-election film for Ronald Reagan, another entertainer-turned-President, one, like Trump, intent on collecting Christian votes. At 73, the Gipper was already way farther gone than Biden is now.
Four years later, Greenwood did the song live at the 1988 convention, performing it just after Reagan’s speech. Those were simpler technological times. Greenwood sang alone to a canned backing track and without rear screen images of the Stars and Stripes, the heartland, the troops.
Greenwood’s signature hit is ardent yet anodyne. This is music that both assures and enflames. Also known by the alternate title “Proud to Be An American,” it is the musical equivalent of Reagan’s senile countenance. There is nothing of substance behind either smile or song. It became forever linked with Reagan and his supposed Revolution, as Greenwood has made sure to stress in the many interviews he did this past week. For the forty years since, Greenwood’s song has acted as the sonic glue charged with keeping the unlikely Christian—Country Club Coalition together.
Back at the 1988 RNC, Greenwood crooned at the podium as Reagan stood like a stone nearby, his frozen in a seemingly benign grin, his hand gripping Nancy’s and releasing it reluctantly to join the crowd in applauding the chorus’s euphoric words: “God Bless the U. S. A.”
In Milwaukee this week, Trump moved to the music with serene purpose.
Over the last four decades, “God Bless the U. S. A.” has been called on continually by Republicans, but Trump has made it essential. He has walked out to the song at countless rallies over the course of his three campaigns. The Bibles that Trump started flogging this spring for $59.99 in hopes of raising money to pay off his mounting legal bills include the handwritten chorus of “Proud to Be an American” along with texts of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance.
With that bundling, Trump canonized “God Bless the U. S. A.” But on Monday evening in Milwaukee it sounded different, sounded like it had found its destiny. The song, like Trump, had been transfigured.
In his improvised prayer of praise spoken over the easy, unctuous vamp that began his appearance, Greenwood invoked God’s providence in saving Trump’s life on Saturday. The power of prayer would now persuade God “to make some changes in this country.” God would even intervene for lower gas prices.
The vamp is a soft-focus, perfumed elaboration of the “Amen” still familiar as the concluding chords tagged onto Protestant hymns. Greenwood’s backup boys turned it into cruise-ship lite-rock, aka Christian Praise music. To this mega-church riff, Trump walked through the backstage corridor towards his entrance amongst the throng. His hair had become a halo tinged with red. His face glowed and glistened as if reflecting the Tongues of Flame of the Pentecost. Rather than bare the ear-wound as a stigmata, his pure white bandage proclaimed his heroism and holiness.
Greenwood’s spoken campaign litany then lifted into song.
The melody of “God Bless the U. S. A.” begins with repeated notes that limply echo the opening shots of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, that anthem so long associated with the Party of Lincoln. Greenwood glazes John Brown’s body in saccharine goo.
The song continues with the warm, fuzzy harmonies of the intro until there is a tonal lurch to a dark place outside the governing tonality: “I’d worked all my life / but had to start again / with just my children and my wife.” But just as quickly, adversity is overcome as the music plants itself right back in the harmonic homeland. “I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today, / ‘cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.” With the most minimal of musical means over just four visionary bars, Greenwood prophesied the economic populism of a Trump convention at which a Teamsters president speaks.
The patriotism and God-loving of the chorus follow to those same churchy chords. When Trump appeared in the arena, the faithful erupted. Greenwood’s voice rose into the refrain as the Chosen One ascended the steps to the dais-cum-altar and towards the Holy Family. Don Junior’s eyes glistened with emotion, but Daddy did not embrace him, offering only a manly handshake instead. Eric got one too, but not the women. Apostate-turned-Apostle, ex-Judas Vance beamed through his beard. Beatified by self and party, the Savior-in-Chief gleamed as the music enfolded him in its aura. And at the words of benediction—“God bless the U. S. A.” —Greenwood had the congregation join in.
Trump did not sing along. He raised his fist, lifted involuntarily by the groundswell of feeling and belief.
Country Club Republicans hadn’t really been listening to Greenwood when they first invited him to entertain them so long ago. Forty years later, the Old Guard guys weren’t even in the room. Trump now literally owned the Country Club and the Establishment had long since stepped out for cigars and Scotch. Yet from the 19thhole in the sky, Reagan smiled down on Monday night, humming along with “God Bless the U. S. A.”
Greenwood and his band of Christian men are off to play the Log Still Distillery in Nelson County, Kentucky next weekend. The Tongues of Flame make bourbon too.
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