As a writer, I’ve had the opportunity to interview my governor, a childhood football hero, and some people who are doing amazing things to help others in need, but I hadn’t had the chance to interview someone as legendary as Pat Boone until last week.
In a career that has spanned 70 years, Boone has seen and done it all, but he hasn’t stopped yet. At age 90, he’s back with a new single that shares his wish for a divided America. “Where Did America Go?” expresses Boone’s longing for this country to return to the principles that have kept us together for centuries.
After seeing what’s happening in the U.S. today, Boone wrote his new single. He sought to write something that wasn’t partisan or denigrated one side or the other, and he took his inspiration from Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” He initially wanted to co-write with Dylan, but the fabled folkie’s touring schedule didn’t allow them to work together.
Boone co-wrote his song with Michael Lloyd, who also produced the record. Laurence Juber, former Paul McCartney and Wings guitarist, and harmonica player Tom Rosen joined Boone.
“We're divided politically. We're divided spiritually. We're divided morally,” Boone said, and he discussed America’s historical moral and political grounding. Evoking Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous statement that “America is great because America is good,” he added, “And that was that was a truism. And so we grew to be great through thick and thin, through wars and depressions and all kinds of things when we worked with each other together and gave each other the credit of being just as human and valuable as we are, any of us.”
Boone holds that we can find the principles that America needs to get back to in two sources: the Bible and the Constitution. “They are closer together and more connected than most people realize,” he attested. “We have to get back to a Bible basis because it is the foundation of the concepts of freedom.”
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One line in the song, “Can one generation erase a great nation?” echoes Ronald Reagan’s famous quote, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Boone likened the far-left influences that have invaded our culture to a parasite that can destroy a healthy body.
“The communists, as they were coming on into this nation, they said, ‘If we get into these schools, in one generation we can change the nation,’” he said. “They have learned how to infiltrate, and it's almost like spiritual and moral trichinosis.”
Boone said he wanted to get this message into the hands of so many people because he knows that his “hourglass doesn’t have that much sand left” and that he wants our country and society to get better. He said that his hope for America is that it won’t take another catastrophic event like 9/11 to bring us back together.
When I asked him what advice he had for patriotic Americans, he mentioned the recent Olympics. Among all the athletes who had worked hard and won gold for the U.S., golfer Scottie Scheffler’s tears during the national anthem and basketball star Steph Curry’s singing the anthem on the medal podium struck him the most.
“We’re not good enough to achieve perfection on our own, athletically or politically or even morally,” Boone mused. “But we're all human beings trying to head in the right direction. And America is the country and its freedoms and liberties and wars and wins that have given us still the freedom to keep on addressing our own problems.”
I couldn’t resist asking Boone how the experience of recording and listening to music has changed over the course of his career. He said that technology makes it easier to fix mistakes in the studio today rather than having to record take after take until you find the best one, as he had to do in the earlier portion of his career. At the same time, he lamented that so much of today’s music isn’t uplifting or positive.
“Music was meant to elevate,” he said. “Music was meant to be a good influence. It was supposed to promote family, values, good things, and not degenerate into something that promotes filth, perversion, every kind of sin there is, and celebrate it.”
Boone is continuing to make other music as well, and he even sang me a sample of one of his recent songs. He told me that he hopes that people will sing his newer songs in churches so that his music can benefit people.
Finally, I asked Boone about his secret for aging well — because I’d love to look and sound as good as he does in 40 years. He chalked it up to the basics like clean living, exercise, and nutrition. He sees his health as one of the many blessings God has given him.
“God gave me — and my mother and dad gave me — a strong body, and I have treasured that enough, just like my other blessings,” he said. “I want to make the most of them and try to further their good use.”
You can listen to “Where Did America Go?” on streaming platforms and purchase it anywhere you buy music. Check out the lyric video below, and visit Boone’s website to see what else he’s been up to.
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