Name: John Rich Explains Story Behind ‘The Devil and the TVA’
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T17:27:23.000Z
Description: 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.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] 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 NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

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.

And an incredible performance venue. First, let’s talk about how you got into music, before we get into everything else you’ve been doing in American politics and shaping culture. How did you get into music in the first place?

I grew up listening to records like Live from Folsom Prison. My dad is a preacher but loved country music, loved the old stuff. So we had Live from Folsom 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 eating and everybody’s sitting around, my dad would always pull his guitar out. And my granddaddy, his dad, wanted to hear Boy Named Sue. Play Boy Named Sue. And he’s over there smoking Marlboro Reds one after the other. Play Boy Named Sue.

My granddaddy would just call 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 just 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 Amarillo, Texas, up in the panhandle to a guitar lesson.

He had all these adults sitting in a room and he had me kind of sit behind him, and he handed me a little cheap guitar, a little kid guitar. He goes, 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 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 in a million years it would be something you could have a career in, but it’s turned out that way.

Was there a moment when you decided to give it a shot?

It was when I was about 15 years old. So we moved from Texas to Tennessee when I was in ninth grade, so I finished high school in Tennessee. I started realizing after meeting some kids at school that there were connections to these great country singers I’d grown up listening to, like Ricky Skaggs, for instance. One of the boys I became friends with said, my dad drives a bus for Ricky Skaggs.

I said, Ricky Skaggs rides on a bus? I’m thinking like a school bus. He goes, well, yeah, a 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 it. I said, your dad knows Ricky Skaggs? He goes, he’s been driving his bus for 10 years.

I realized at that moment that I was within 35 or 40 miles from Music Row, 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 into. 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 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, a 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 inn 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 were 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 multi-platinum country act. I wrote my first number one song when I was 21 years old.

When I saw the video, Robin Williams, Live at the Met, he got up and said, yee-ha, strong opera house. Everyone seemed to understand what he was talking about, but I had no idea it was about the Grand Ole Opry.

The Grand Ole 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’d 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 giant pinnacle moment for any country singer, including me.

So that happened to you.

It happened, yes. Lone Star 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, yes. 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.

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, which is 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 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. They’re the ones that go out and play 200 nights a year, year after year after year, getting sharper 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. Now you’ve got 250 major market radio stations that have to see you and meet you and go to lunch with you. You have to convince them to play your music. You have to play free radio shows for them over and over and over again, all over the United States. So to really do it for real is a lifelong commitment.

You write music, you perform music, and you do a lot more than that. Do you remember the first time you actually wrote a song?

Oh, of course. I don’t care what any guy ever tells you. If there’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.

Many country songs have that theme.

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.

I 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 yes, girls are 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 then 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 Einsteins of country songwriting: Mark D. Sanders, Paul Nelson, Larry Boone, Don Cook, Chick Rains, and Sharon Vaughn. It was this list of writers that had written, The Gambler, and, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, for Willie Nelson. That level of songwriters was currently writing at that time. I’m only 20 years old, 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.

That’s where I learned how to really craft a song; every syllable in that song has to hit. 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.

It seems there are only a few themes. One of them is, I met a girl and it didn’t work out. It’s about loss.

Yes, loss. What’s another theme? I met a girl, and it did work out. Love. Fun. Sadness. Populism. What’s going on right now? What’s going on in the world?

One song that really struck me was Revelation. So connection with God also plays into this.

Of course, God plays into everything. He doesn’t play into us; we play into Him. He’s the boss. So Revelation is a song about….I’ll just back up for 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, and 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. 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 even if the biggest label, like Sony Records, offered me all the money in the world and said, come back. I would say, no, thank you. Because freedom of speech is invaluable, and I get to express it freely these days.

You were all set, but this gave you the ability to say, no thanks folks. Please tell us about that decision.

Warner Brothers Records, which was the last major label I was on, started calling me into meetings because they didn’t like something, 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 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 & Rich decided that we’re not done. We’ve got a lot more songs in us.

We just started our own record label, Big & Rich Records, hired our own promotion team, and 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 just dwarfs terrestrial radio. It’s not even close. That’s the position I’m in now.

But it is still a battle. Every time I put out a new song, I need people like you to come over and ask me about it, and let your audience hear about it. I rely on a lot of people to help me get the word out, so I’m grateful you came.

Can you play a bit of Revelation?

Sure. Let me ask you something.  What is it that struck you about the song?

The word that comes to mind is reverence. I sensed deep reverence, which I appreciate.

Yes, there is deep reverence in it. It’s 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 on 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 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 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? Is 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, Jan? Have you ever heard another song like Revelation?

No, I haven’t. That’s why I remember it the most.

I’ll play a piece of it.

“Dancing in the flames, the people cursed His name, bowed at the altar of the father of lies. There’s a number to their days and all their evil ways; the Lord’s gonna turn away from all their cries. Oh, dear 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.”

It’s got a little Cash in it, especially later Johnny Cash. 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 mention to me. Just like you just did. Revelation, man, that song. Wow, wow, wow. Because it’s not even really a song.

Yes, 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, disciple, apostle, prophet John wrote in the book of Revelation. I made it into a song.

So in the end, it does have to rhyme.

It 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.

You’ve written around 2,000 songs. That’s quite prolific.

If you figure an average song takes about 10 hours to write, 8 to 10 hours, and multiply that by over 2,000, that’s a lot of time spent writing songs. But out of those 2,000-plus, I’ve had 218 of them recorded by major artists. So I’m batting about 10 percent.

How many of them do you actually perform?

Of the 218, probably 60 or 70 of those. But then a lot of other artists started coming in. 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 said, 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.

For instance, take Jason Aldean, a huge, massive country artist, who plays football stadiums. Before he ever got a record deal, he heard some of my songs. He 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, and he did.

On Jason’s first record, I was a writer on seven out of 10 songs, almost the whole first record. The same thing with Gretchen Wilson, who wound up selling 10 million-plus records. Those songs were written when my phone was not ringing. Those songs were written when I had no deal, and when I was damaged goods in the industry.

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 have to find something that you still can control, as simple as it may be, and control it well.

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