An Interview with Lee Greenwood: His Life, Love of Military and Music

Country music legend Lee Greenwood is partnering with Breland Homes and Helping A Hero to build a home for a local wounded warrior. The announcement will be made in October at an “All-Star Salute to Lee Greenwood,” at the Von Braun Center featuring 40 country music stars performing Greenwood’s music.

At the opening of the show, the country music icon and Louis Breland will formally announce the Wounded Warrior recipient of the new home.

The Huntsville Business Journal chatted with country music star Lee Greenwood about his passion for the U.S. military, his work with Helping A Hero, and his 40-plus years in the music business.

You come from humble beginnings I believe?

Lee Greenwood:

I grew up on a farm in Sacramento with my grandparents as my guardians. They taught me the lessons of life: a handshake is your word; morals are important; follow your passion; treat everybody fairly; and your neighbors are your friends.

We were not wealthy, but my mother was a musician, so there was a piano in our trailer. I played the piano at night because music interested me at a young age – seven, eight, nine, ten years old. 

I also played sports, and baseball was extremely important to me as well.

That’s right! You recently snuck into town to dedicate home plate at the new Rocket City Trash Pandas Toyota Field, didn’t you?  

I did. I think I was the first person on the field. 

You clearly have a passion for the U.S. military. How did that come about?

My father joined the Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and my mom worked a lot. It was a tough time for families during the 1940s.

I decided music would be my path to life. 

By the time I was 14 or 15, I was working the airbases near our home – McClellan Air Force Base and Beale Air Force Base. I played the dances there with my band. That was where my interest with the military began, and where I began to recognize the sacrifices of the military.

You traveled the world with the USO didn’t you?

My first international tour was for the USO when I was 17 years old. We went to Alaska before it was a state.

I toured with Bob Hope in 1988-89. It was 25,000 miles around the world; eight stops and eight shows and a lot of celebrities. 

Someone brought me a picture recently taken onboard the USS Missouri in the Persian Gulf of me with Bob Hope and Connie Stevens, standing right underneath the guns.

I traveled with the USO my whole life and I still do, but I do a lot of things inside the country now. I like to bring our troops a piece of home. That is the USO’s motto: Until Everyone Comes Home. 

What is Helping A Hero’s process for selecting the Wounded Warrior? There must be many worthy candidates. 

We have a staff who is notified when a soldier is wounded. They are then vetted to find out a few things like “Are they optimistic about the future?” “Do they have a future?” “Are they in line for a procedure like a liver transplant or to correct a problem caused by their injury?” 

Once they are vetted, depending on availability of funds, how many people qualify and how fast we can build the homes – their name is put in line to receive a home.

It is not dependent on the severity of the wound. Once they are vetted, they are a candidate, and they will receive a home as fast as we can get the funds to build it. 

The current push is to build at least one home every three months.

When you wrote “God Bless the U.S.A.”, did you have any idea it would become such a hit?

 I wrote “God Bless the U.S.A.” in 1983 on my bus while touring. I was touring heavily during those years, and it was never intended to be a single record. It was merely a song dedicated to my country.

We included it on the album “You’ve Got A Good Love Comin’”, which was our fourth album for MCA and it was only a side-cut.

Had Universal not make the call to make it a single, I doubt it would have ever been heard.

I had no idea the scope of the song would reach so many people and its involvement in American society started in 1985. It had already garnered awards in the country music community in Nashville.

Gen. Schwarzkopf used it for the Gulf War and then it became a song of unity in the wake of Katrina, and again during the terrorist attacks on 9/11. 

So, did I ever anticipate that? Absolutely not.

Tell us about the “All-Star Salute to Lee Greenwood” in October at the VBC.

Forty music stars from the country music community will appear and sing all of my most famous songs while I sit there and watch. 

We will mutually decide who will sing what songs, so the show is really a tribute to the music, but also to the engineers, the producers, the musicians, the singers, and all those people that made those records possible. 

Some of the people you will see are Crystal Gayle, Michael W. Smith, Randy Owen of the band Alabama, Richie MacDonald of Lonestar … so many more. There will be 40 of them.