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EXCLUSIVE – Lee Greenwood and Sarah Evans release new songs with a surprise songwriter in the credits, the late President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan may have been busy running for president of the United States back in the 1970s and winding down his tenure as governor of California, but he still found time to write a few patriotic songs with producer Mike Curb, founder and chairman of Curb Records.
Curb said he met Reagan in 1974, his last year as governor, at an event for Junior Achievement, a charity that teaches students about free enterprise. The two hit it off, and Reagan asked the songwriter if he wanted to help him with his presidential campaign.
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Curb credits California’s heavy traffic for giving him and Reagan plenty of songwriting time in the ’70s, beginning with “Together, a New Beginning.”
“And that’s why there was so much traffic in California in the ’70s that I drove with them,” Curb said Fox News Digital. “And a few times we wrote songs together. One of them was the theme for the convention in 1980, which sounded. It was called “Together, a new beginning”… several of our performers came to the convention. was in Detroit that year… And then that song was sung at the convention.”
Ronald Reagan during his campaign for the presidency. (Getty Images)
In 1976, Reagan lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford, but Curb said he channeled his frustration into writing more music.
“And then we wrote a song called ‘God Has a Greater Plan’ after he lost the election in 1976,” Curb shared. “He was a little down and didn’t think he was going to run again. And I told him, ‘God has a bigger plan.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s what Nancy says,’ and then we wrote a song called ‘God Is the Bigger Plan’… And then we wrote a third song, ‘We Can Start the World Again,’ which was all his lyrics.”
Many years later, producer Mark Joseph played it for Lee Greenwood, who decided to correct it and change it to “Let’s start the world over.”
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Greenwood remembered that memorable conversation.
“He said, ‘Ronald Reagan and Mike Curb were trying to write a song,'” Greenwood told Fox News Digital. “And he sent it to me, and he said it really wasn’t – it was never completed.” The idea was to change the world, and how naive that is, but what a beautiful thought it is.’
“And I knew Ronald Reagan pretty well, I knew Mike Kerb well – I worked at his label for a while and that gave me the opportunity to rework the song, Greenwood continued. – I redid the song for them, they liked it. I recorded a version and it should be out soon on their secondary album from the movie Reagan.
Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office. (Noah “Nanea” Hamilton/Rawhide Pictures)
Greenwood wrote a new song, but said he kept some specific words, including the phrase “beacon of freedom.”
The “Proud to Be an American” singer told about it. Tennessee that he mixed Reagan’s “altruism” and Curb’s “visionary” tendencies along with a desire to reframe the song as uniquely tied to his awareness of Reagan’s legacy and the many conversations they had about “how much he believed in the United States as the greatest symbol in the world for freedom”.
“These songs remind many generations of what (we fondly) remember about the ‘good old days’ in American society,” Curb said of the song. “Honestly portraying who Reagan was at his core as an artist and a centrist-oriented, responsible, kind and fair person who was easy to get along with.”
Asked if he was surprised by Reagan’s songwriting abilities, Curb noted that before Reagan entered politics, he had been a Hollywood star for many years. During his career, Reagan starred in or appeared in more than 50 films. He was the subject of the 2024 biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid as the 40th president.
Singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“He was an amazing guy,” Kurb said. “Because, you know, when you sit in the back seat with him, it was like sitting with your neighbor. Very down to earth. I think all my friends, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, they kind of look back on Reagan as the good old days.”
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“Start the World Again” will be released soon, and country singer Sarah Evans is expected to release her record “God Has a Greater Plan.”
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Lambert contributed to this report.
