American Thought Leaders - John Rich Explains Story Behind ‘The Devil and the TVA’

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

When an 88‑year‑old Tennessee woman confronted representatives of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) when they came to survey her land for a methane gas plant project, her words—“you think you own something, you don’t own nothing”—left a lasting impression on country artist John Rich.That moment became the spark for his new song “The Devil and the TVA” and the starting point for this conversation on “American Thought Leaders.”In this episode, Rich reflects on his journey from Texas family sing‑alongs to writing No. 1 hits with bands Lonestar and Big & Rich. He explains why he walked away from major record labels to protect his creative freedom, and he shares how songs like “Revelation” and “Earth to God” to connect present‑day turmoil with enduring spiritual truths.Along the way, he opens up about the lessons he has learned about faith, fame, and standing firm in what matters most.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Warner Brothers Records started calling me into 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, and this is a 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 vest, loaded weapons, and this lady's 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 of it. 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 Yanya Kellick. 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 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. It seems like only Johnny Cash and Edith Keff, different genre. Yeah. But I still remember, live from Folsom Prison,

I can play it in my mind, so we listened to a cassette tape so many times as a kid. They've very, very warm memories. Let's just talk a little bit about how you got into this. Before we get into the whole, everything you've been doing, you know, in American politics, called 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 Falson Prison. My dad is a preacher, but love country music, love the old stuff. So we had Life from Falson Prison. We had Roger Miller. We had Tennessee Ernie Ford. We had all the greats from that 50s and 60s era of country music. And my dad's a really good singer, really good guitar player.

So, you know, at family events, when you get through Eaton, and everybody's sitting around. My dad would always pull his guitar out. And my granddad, his dad, wanted to hear boy named Sue. Play boy named Sue. And he's over there smoking Marlborough Reds, you know, one after the other. Play boy named Sue. My grandad just called out songs, and my dad knew him all and would play him.

And I always thought that was just so cool that my dad could just sit there and just play him 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 Amarola, 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 know, 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 granddad would say, play boy named Sue, I could pick 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 dreamed a million years. 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 am going to give it a shot on the career path? When I was about 15, about 15 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 realizing after meeting some kids at school that there were connections to these great country singers I'd 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 I said your dad knows Ricky Skaggs he goes he's been driving his bus for 10 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 content 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 a corner, I'll drink a glass of water, I just want to get up and sing. And so I started entering talent contest, 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 Ole 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 it 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 multi-platinum 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 opery, and this was a Robin Williams live at the mat.

He says, you know, he gets up and he says, howdy? And he's, whoops, wrong opera house. And I was like, what does he, everyone seem to understand? Right. What he was talking about. I had no idea. I mean, Grandal 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 opera. That'd probably be the ultimate, ultimate. 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 200 days a year, 200 days a year.

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 to either get discovered on YouTube, there's nothing wrong with that, or they want to go win American Idol, nothing wrong with that either. But the vast majority of people that not only make it but have long career, 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. They're the ones that go out and play 200 nights a year, year after year after year, getting sharper and better and better. 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. 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 that you have to convince them to play your music and go play free radio shows for them over and over and over all of the United States. So it is a to really do it for real, it is a lifelong commitment. And you do a lot more. Makes you tired hearing about it, doesn't it?

Yeah, you went, I'm tired, just listen to that. Yeah, no doubt. I'm tired remembering it. You write music, you perform music, and you do a lot more than that. We're going to talk about all of it. Do you remember the first time you actually wrote a song? You remember? Oh, of course. 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 country song I have. heard involved that that's that's the whole impetus for for figuring out of play through four chords is girls and so there was a girl and uh she was dating the football player

i i ain't 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 up stuck it in her locker and it worked and the football player wanted to whip 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 now you've got a record deal, now you're a commodity, now you're an income 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 Einstein's of country songwriting. Mark D. Sanders, Paul Nelson, Larry Boone, Don Cook, Chick,

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 the 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 word smith with a song and make it stick write a hit song and i those people are all my mentors i mean that that crew of songwriters in my mind were the best that ever walked to the uninitiated like myself and so forth it's just there's there's just a few themes

it seems like and this is maybe you can tell me right the answer to this it seems to this it seems 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. Loss. I've heard a lot of those. Yes, a loss.

What's another thing? Well, that's... I met a girl and it did work out. Right. Love. Right. Fun. Sadness.

Populist. What's going on? What's going on in the world? And, you know, 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. So connection with God, it also plays into this. Of course. Yeah, God plays into everything.

He doesn't play 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 have never been heard by a soul

because they would have taken that recording and said, nice song, John, what else you got? And they 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 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. You're giving up 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, 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 a feat that is only possible generally if you have a major record deal. But when you've got 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, but you decided. And, I mean, of course, this gave you the ability to say, no thanks anymore, 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 interviews like that anymore. You can't 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, 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. And so we just started our own record label, big and rich records, hired our own promotion team, put our own money into it. 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 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? I can ask you, let me flip the interview around. What's the listener thing? 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. But 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 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 and 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.

And you watch a Super Bowl halftime 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 on humanity on behalf of their father, the devil, what about us? What about the other side? Somebody going to say,

somebody 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 ever heard another song like Revelation? No, I mean, I haven't. And that's why that's the one that's the one I remember most. I'll play a piece of it. Please.

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 Oh, revelation, I can feel it coming Like a dark train running Oh, get ready

Because 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... It's probably, now that you're saying it, it reminds me. It's got, 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 to mention to me just like you just did revelation man that song wow 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 written something to the tune of 2000 songs. Right. I mean, that's quite a prolific repertoire. If you figure an average song takes about 10 hours to write 8 to 10 hours and multiply that by over 2000, that's a lot of time spent writing songs. But, you know, out of those 2000 plus, I've had 218 of them recorded by major artists. So I'm batting about 10%. How many of them do you actually perform? Of the 218? Probably probably 60 or 70 of those. But then a lot of other artists started coming in.

You know, when I, 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 Aldeen, he's a huge country artist, massive, plays football stadiums. Jason Al Dean, 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 you a record deal, you know, and he did. So on Al Dean's first record, seven out of his ten songs, I was a writer on those songs. The whole, almost the whole first record. But same thing with Gretchen Wilson, who wound up selling, you know, 10 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, 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've 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. Yeah, you gotta cut firewood before the winter hits, right? It's like the verse and proverbs about the ant. It says the ant goes out and stores it's 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 to all of them. Yeah, Revelation is a different animal. all together um but is there one like i mean earth to god you mentioned that song earlier that that song actually is being saying in churches all across the u.s 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 in 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 here come the vaccine mandates and then here comes people burning our cities down all across the U.S. It was horrible. And I look out to one and I go, I had this picture in my head of like an old World War II 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? I had this picture of like an old man sitting behind this microphone pressing the button going earth to god come in god like hailing god because the whole

planet's on fire there's a pandemic going i mean everything's upside down and i thought that'd 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. And the interviews I did around that, I said, listen, he's literally right there.

You feel like the whole world's 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, thought you'd never ask. That's what that song was all about. You know, I've had that moment in my life. You've had these moments where you were, you know, well, I don't know.

You would say probably you're at the top of your game now, right? I don't know. 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, I was at the top of the game then too. You were, I don't know, you won celebrity apprentice back in there. It was a big deal, right? A lot of people knew who you were. Yeah. 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 of tables all across the U.S. 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 fist fights in one night in Los Angeles, California. I mean, just absolute, just full out rock and roll out here. And at some point you realize on 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 card since then, and that was 2010. 2010. And I have played a lot of places, thousands,

where I could go play cards anytime I want. I want it. I refuse. I will never play cards ever again. It was absolute cold turkey, full stop. And that was the beginning of me starting to come back around and hearing him again and what he wanted me to actually do. Well, this is what I was thinking about as you were saying that, you know, you actually, you listened and you listened hard, it seems. 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, knock 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, go get back in here, get back in the yard. Don't play in the street. You 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. 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. But it's the same thought process that he has towards us. So when I look back at 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 probably I was somewhere in between the getting the teeth knocked out and the brains knocked out. and it was a really rough time in my life, but it ended up when I look back, and I mean this sincerely, the best thing that ever happened to me.

Sure. Because 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 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 light them on fire. They call that a Roman candle. So Saul's whole job was to do that. I mean, he was just vicious. And then the road to Damascus, God knocked his, all his teeth out,

smacked him so hard. And 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 there's, 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, there's a lot of fun. I mean, I'm just thinking of this, 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 somebody would say or do or that would happen. And I remember, man, when I was growing up, it wasn't like that. I mean, when I was growing 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 because you're black. And he's going, I don't know if I like you because you're white, but they still had dinner together and hung out. And 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 somebody's waving an american flag and 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 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.

Doodoo do do, do, 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 with the guitar? Let's see. Because 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 the fragile feelings hurt every single time my country truck I gas it up you've got your fancy Tesla hooked up to a plug I know you're mad

you think I'm bad because 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'll order us a beer

we can sit down right here and screaming, yelling, cussing, fuss, and fight. Right? It's fantastic. Spot on. And, you know, there's a moment in the music video where, you know, the guys, I think, I expecting the guys are going to fight,

but they don't. They just kind of... They wind up. They kind of make up... Yeah, okay. They click their beers, yeah. Yeah, the video is hilarious. Mike, all these girls get in a fight.

You've got girls with, like, nose rings and purple hair, and then country girls with cowboys. hats and ball caps. They get in a fight. Mike Lundell 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, you know, 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 love.

literally write about any subject you want to. 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 making fun of something like I'm offended. And that's what I love about. 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's one that you're just about to to launch um why do you think the devil figures into country music songwriting as much as he does it makes me i i've heard that in a number of titles of the devil went down to georgia charlie daniels there you go exactly yeah that's probably the best example exactly but but it's but it's there's multiple examples

it's not just it's common you're right why why is that i think 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, you know, gospel and Christian in its nature. 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. I mean, Carrie Underwood's first single was Jesus Take the Will. First song she ever put out. Jesus take the wheel.

People that make country music for a living, not all of them, but a lot 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 to 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 whoop the devil. Good for Charlie Daniels. You know, so I think that's the reason why it comes in. And pop music and rap and a lot of other genres when they talk about the devil,

they talk about him in a very loving sort of a 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 anybody?

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. 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, message or whatever, it does the exact same thing. It goes right into one 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 to 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 TBA was that they only answer 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 to come on your land. 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 that direction called Cheatham County, Tennessee. My dad has a blueberry farm in Cheatham 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, 19th and 11th. My granny rich, my papal rich, they

live there till they died in that county. I still have some somewhere. land out there in Cheatham County. I know it very well. Know the people there 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 900 megawatt methane gas plant with 10 acres of lithium battery storage. And my brother says the lithium batteries they're talking about are the size of an 18 wheeler trailer. Each. They want 10 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 500 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 Asson 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.

And 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, 12 vehicles deep, people get out of the cars, bulletproof vests, loaded weapons. I mean, 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, Ms. Nicholson, that's the TVA, and they pull out an iPhone. They go, 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 10 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 nothing just like that it's it's powerful 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 firsthand 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

come on over. So he came to this exact room, sat with me back in the back of this room for less than 30 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? Show her to the map, she went, yeah, that comes under my jurisdiction. So then she weighed in, and then ultimately Trump, weight 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, it is curious because there are other options for the location of the methane plant. Of course. The plant is not in itself a problem. No, the county was giving them another option. They have a 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 been 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 has made it 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 tBA come in and destroy 6,000 acres of farmland they're not going to get reelected 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 tried to do that yeah you can't build it there you can build it here we're good with that you cannot build it here and duke energy i 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 when we can get their charter change where they have to treat people different in this country. So you won, and I guess the song's still coming out. song still i made the man a deal i made him a promise i said get out of our county in two weeks where 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 gonna give me a little bit of a you want to hear a piece of the devil a little bit of the song so yeah i'd love to thank you uh the the first line in the chorus is miss nicholson's phrase you think you own something but you don't own nothing and 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 course of the devil and the tva i will uh congratulate the people at cheatham county that stood up and pushed with me on this thing and and secretary rollins and the president of the united states what a story and uh mrs nicholson especially i appreciate her having the boldness to make a statement like that. It goes like this. For a hundred some odd years,

our families worked the same old fields, raised their kids and grandkids right there on that land. Saw the storms flood their ground, watched their crops die in the drought, stared the great depression down and never ran. But now they're looking. 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 Put his dirty old boots on your ground laughs at your protest With a gun in a bulletproof vest And he don't care what you have to say He's just going to do it anyway.

And he'll smile and grin and then take your farm away. 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 Ms. Nichols, I was recently in Montpellier, at James Home of James Madison, and he has this line where quote where he says conscience is the is the most supreme form of property actually and it's very very powerful thing and I was looking at it I was trying to kind of understand it and then I got me thinking about how how central private property is actually the freedom right 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 want it you own it You come out here and develop this land, homestead this land, you can actually own land in America.

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, in 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 smothering. then condemn it, then offer her 10 cents on the dollar. Get out. There is 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 presidentally appointed position as a citizen advocate. where when I find egregious things going on like what happened in Sheatham 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.

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 panels and boards. 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, I, I like, I love. 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 seven in Congress. I've been asked to run for Senate seats, 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.

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. Would that be a cool thing? I think they're blessed to have you here. Well, I would 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, kind of an Indian guy from Long Island is not the immediate person you imagine as being the country music fan of 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 that, how you guys actually got 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. And I was watching Devin Nunez and 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, and this guy's scrappy. I like this guy.

Like I identify with that attitude all day long. So then I started following him. And 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 someday. That'd be great. He goes, you know what? We'll come to Nashville. 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 Truth 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 Cass 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 we're on lockdowns at this point.

Got online with a couple other big songwriters, Vicki McGeehee 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, you know, since then, um, become an actual friend of mine. So we, 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 Bongino have learned since they've

had those jobs. Dan's another guy I've known for a very long time. So, it's always, had a lot of respect for cash and his unwillingness to back off. He just wouldn't back up off of anybody and took a beating over that. Even the J6 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 segues, 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's sort of segues really well into the last thing i wanted to talk about with you which is you know i was listening to the song the man build on that a little bit more

you know the the man you want to be you know so what is what's in the future for for john rich beyond being an ombudsman or omsvidsman right um i think at this point you know i spent many years of my life self-serving serving serving myself decades living that way and so now I look at what hopefully I get to live another 50 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's the worst in our country, in my mind, is what happens to kids in this country. 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 might 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 they're 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 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 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's never was dealt with and they then become abusers themselves and on and on and on I love to 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 Solzahitzen, 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 that's been born out through many stories of many many people throughout history even in the bible that's born i mean king david who god referred to as a man after my own heart at one point in his life put eurya 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, knocked 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. You're born into sin.

You've 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 them. 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't threaten me with a good time. I mean, that's going to be the best day of your life. So I view it like that. 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. I 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 to great work. You're very important to American culture, what you guys are doing. Thank you so very much. Yes, sir. Thank you. This room back here, this is kind of where I write a lot of the songs. The Man, like, 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 got to 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 least. teaches he's all 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 my i told you my dad gave me a little kid guitar to learn on that's that yeah that's a nice 79 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 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 and 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 compete with Johnny Cash, you'll never stop pushing because you're never going to beat him. Stuff like that's my Grinney Rich's sewing machine. 1910. She ran her own business, so she was 88 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 would 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 just as American as it gets. Thank you all for joining John Rich and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick. Thank you.