In September 2019, Blake Shelton spent a week on social media doing something a star at the top of the charts almost never does. He asked his fans to help another man’s song climb past his own. The song was Craig Morgan’s “The Father, My Son, and the Holy Ghost,” and the man it was written for was Craig’s son Jerry Greer, who died three years earlier at 19.
The afternoon on Kentucky Lake
On Sunday, July 10, 2016, Jerry was tubing behind a boat on Kentucky Lake in Humphreys County, Tennessee, with a friend. The two collided and went into the water. The friend came back up. Jerry, though wearing a life jacket, did not. His body was recovered the following evening, and the death was ruled an accidental drowning.
Jerry had graduated from Dickson County High School that spring and was set to play football at Marshall University in the fall. He was one of Craig and Karen Greer’s four children. The last evening Craig spent with his son was at one of his own Grand Ole Opry shows. The last photographs of the two of them together were taken on that stage.
A career that nearly ended
Craig kept touring, but he later told Rolling Stone that there were nights he wondered whether he should be onstage at all. He had not had a real radio hit since 2013, he was in his fifties, and grief made it hard to care. He was seriously thinking about walking away.
Then, early in 2019, he woke at 3:30 in the morning with a full chorus running through his head. He nearly went back to sleep, sure he would never remember it. Instead he left Karen asleep, went off alone, and wrote until dawn.
“I just cried and wrote and cried and wrote.”
The title plays on the Trinity. Craig and his family had been going through conversion to the Catholic Church when Jerry died, and Craig was received into the Church at Easter the following year. He has said he worried at first whether his priest would object to the wording, then decided the meaning held.
The night at the Opry
He wrote the song for his family. His band heard it and pushed him to play it live. He tried it at a show in Colorado, then sang it at the Grand Ole Opry in July 2019, the stage he associated with his last evening with Jerry. He walked off exhausted, in tears, and told Ricky Skaggs he did not think he could ever sing it again.
“Ricky told me, ‘You have to sing this song for the rest of your life.'”
He released it himself on August 30, 2019, with no record label behind him. It was his first new music in three years.
The text to Blake
Craig sent the song to a few friends. One was Blake Shelton, whom he considered his closest friend among artists. Blake and Gwen Stefani had been at Jerry’s funeral. Blake also knew this kind of grief from the inside: his older brother Richie was killed in a car accident when Blake was 14.
It took Blake a while to press play. When he finally did, he was home by himself.
“I was by myself at the house and I lost my mind.”
One week of tweets
On September 9, Blake told his followers he would gladly give up his own place on country radio if it meant getting Craig’s song played. He was not exaggerating his position. He had several songs moving at the time, including “God’s Country,” which was near the top of the sales charts.
Over the next few days he kept going. He urged roughly 20 million followers to download the song and told them to get past “God’s Country” and put Craig’s song on top. Kelly Clarkson, Ellen DeGeneres, Luke Combs, Bret Michaels, Carson Daly and Gwen Stefani joined in.
On September 12, “The Father, My Son, and the Holy Ghost” reached No. 1 on the all-genre iTunes chart as well as the country chart. Blake’s post that day closed by dedicating the moment to Jerry. Craig was in Alaska at the time and only learned what was happening when his phone filled with messages.
From a phone screen to country radio
Within days, Craig reunited with Broken Bow Records, his label for six years in the 2000s, home of “Almost Home” and “That’s What I Love About Sunday.” In announcing the deal, he thanked his friend Blake by name for what he had done to honor Jerry. The song went to country radio as an official single on October 7 and was among the most-added songs that week.
On October 17, Craig sat down on The Kelly Clarkson Show. Clarkson surprised him by bringing Blake out; the two had not seen each other since the song came out. Craig explained what three years of grief felt like.
“Every day is yesterday.”
Then he stood up and sang it, while Blake, Clarkson and guest Eva Mendes wiped their eyes in the front of the room.
What Craig took from it
Craig said afterward that he was reading hundreds of messages a day from families who had lost children. He has never claimed the song fixed anything; he has said plainly he would rather none of it had happened and his son were still here. But the song he nearly kept to himself, and nearly stopped singing after one night, reached those families because a friend who had stood at Jerry’s funeral decided it mattered more than his own record.