“I didn’t want to write a patriotic song,” he said. “And I didn’t want it to be vengeful, either. But I didn’t want to forget about how I felt and how I knew other people felt that day.”
Then, early on Sunday, October 28, he woke up at about 4 a.m. with a melody and the chorus running through his head. He went downstairs and sang them into a digital recorder so he wouldn’t forget. Later that morning, while his wife, Denise, and their daughters were at Sunday school, he finished the verses.
“I think it was a gift,” he said, “and I’m just a messenger for it.”
At first, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to record it. He didn’t want anyone to think he was taking advantage of a tragedy. But his wife and his producer loved it. When he played it for his record label, one executive remembered, “Nobody spoke for a full minute.”
On November 7, 2001, just eight weeks after the attacks, Alan sat down on a stool at the CMA Awards in Nashville and sang it for the first time.
The song asks simple questions, like “Where were you when the world stopped turning?” and “Did you call up your mother and tell her you loved her?” In the chorus, he calls himself “a singer of simple songs” and ends with words from the Bible: “Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us, and the greatest is love.”
When he finished, the audience rose to its feet. By the next morning, radio stations were already playing it, and within six weeks it was the No. 1 country song in America. It also won Alan his first Grammy.
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