Lee Greenwood says Maren Morris doesn't get country 'at all'

Lee Greenwood thinks Maren Morris doesn’t ‘understand country music at all’

Separate photos of Lee Greenwood holding a microphone and Maren Morris posing in a strapless black top

Oct. 18, 2023 12:44 PM PT

Country singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood, most famous for his America-loving song “God Bless the U.S.A.,” has some thoughts on Maren Morris’ decision to leave country music.

In an opinion piece for Fox News, Greenwood criticized the “My Church” artist’s gripes with the morals of the country music industry.

“To suggest that country music is ‘too patriotic’ is to not understand country music at all,” Greenwood wrote. “It’s in our very name: country music. Our music is written for love of our country, our heart for America.”

Morris told the New York Times’ ”Popcast” podcast early this month that songs such as Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” show that the genre is “so steeped in, weirdly, like patriotism or quasi-patriotism, lots of like, overt hypermasculinity, Whiteness — that’s just like how it’s been from the jump.”

In a September interview with the Los Angeles Times, Morris noted that the underlying tone of much of country music had distanced her from the genre.

“I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over. But it’s burning itself down without my help,” Morris said. “[T]he stories going on within country music right now, I’ve tried to avoid a lot of it at all costs. I feel very, very distanced from it.”

Of particular concern for Morris was country music’s lean into what she sees as the exclusionary morals of many artists within the genre.

“After the [Donald] Trump years, people’s biases were on full display. It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic,” she said. “All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music.”

Greenwood viewed Morris’ grievances with the genre as its strength.

“Because country music is so closely tied to the heartbeat of America, it also happens to reflect what’s happening across the country at the very moment,” he wrote. “As a result, it’s not that politics has infiltrated country music, it’s quite the opposite — music ends up reflecting the very conversations happening across the country today.”

He added, “Political trends will change with the winds, but the core of country music remains: love of country, love of freedom, love of America. There’s nothing wrong with that, and that’s not going to change any time soon.”

The 80-year-old singer has aligned himself politically with the Republican party. He has performed at the inauguration of every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, has made several appearances alongside Trump and has praised the former president as a “patriot.”

Greenwood ended his open letter with a plea to the genre-hopping singer.

“Morris would be wiser to stay in country music, where she could continue the conversation and present her interpretation of what it means to be American today,” Greenwood wrote. “However, suggesting that individual country music artists [or the entire genre of country music!] ought to be ‘canceled’ because you don’t like the lyrics is a slippery slope to censorship, free expression, and is out of line with the values of hard work, freedom, and grit that have made country music so great to this day.”

Lee Greenwood thinks Maren Morris doesn’t ‘understand country music at all’

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