PHOENIX — It's Veteran's Night at the Arizona State Fair, and flags and star-spangled clothes are more prevalent than stuffed animals. The roar of the dirt track race on the far end of the fairgrounds fills the hot night air, and fairgoers are munching on corn dogs while enjoying the local major leaguers' winning of the National League pennant.
This is the perfect place, the perfect time, for Lee Greenwood.
Inside the fairgrounds arena, the lights cut out and a simple if somewhat odd introduction brings the crowd to its feet: "American patriot Lee Greenwood!"
The onetime Las Vegas blackjack dealer and showroom singer emerges in black and turquoise leather and begins his set, and the crowd sits back down and politely waits for the Song.
Greenwood offers versions of "Tequila" and "Rocky Top," but it's not until the final song that members of the audience jump to their feet. They sway arm in arm, hold aloft lighters, sing along, cry, screech and wave plastic American flags with wrist-wrenching intensity.
This is the perfect place, the perfect time for "God Bless the U.S.A."
The 1984 hit that resurged in popularity during the Persian Gulf War is a hit again, as radio stations across the country have added it to their play lists in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The song, with its emotional swells and populist imagery, is no favorite of the critics, but it's easily the most successful patriotic song of recent decades, and for Greenwood, that has been a blessing and a curse. The song, he says, is bigger than the singer.
"It's a career song and an umbrella that keeps you out of the rain but can also keep you out of the sunshine," he says backstage before the show. "The song has taken me places I would never have gone. But there are times when I've said, 'Let's get on with the rest of my career.' But the song is a shadow it's not easy to get out of."
The song has taken Greenwood to the flight decks of aircraft carriers and the cockpits of fighter planes and earned him a special award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. He has met five presidents, cashed in on big-dollar corporate appearances and performed at every imaginable type of sporting event. And after the Sept. 11 attacks, he climbed atop the rubble at the World Trade Center to sing the song for rescue workers. In a recent opinion poll on America Online, "God Bless the U.S.A." topped all other patriotic songs, including "God Bless America" and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
