Nine years ago today, Craig Morgan‘s 19-year-old son drowned. Jerry Greer was wearing a life jacket when he went underwater during a tubing accident on the Tennessee River. He didn’t resurface, and rescuers found his remains the following day in Kentucky Lake.”

Morgan and his wife Karen couldn’t be there. They’d raced over to the site when the accident happened. Since Morgan is a famous country singer, his presence attracted too much attention.

In his memoir God, Family, Country, Morgan wrote that he made a deal with the sheriff. He told him that to make the search easier, he and Karen would leave. However, when they found Jerry, Morgan wanted to be notified so he could be there when his body was recovered.

“You have to promise me,” I told him, “I’m his daddy, and it’s my responsibility to get him out.” The sheriff agreed.

Craig Morgan: “I’m His Daddy, and It’s My Responsibility”

Almost three years after Morgan helped pull his son’s body from Kentucky Lake, he got out of bed at 3:30 a.m. and started to write. Morgan is the sole writer and producer on “The Father, My Son, And The Holy Ghost,” which he released as an independent artist in 2019. The song is a tribute to Jerry.

Lyrics include: I know my boy ain’t here, but he ain’t gone/ In the mornings I wake up, give her a kiss, head to the kitchen/ Pour a cup of wake-me-up and try to rouse up some ambition/ Go outside, sit by myself but I ain’t alone/I’ve got the Father, my son, and the Holy Ghost

Morgan remembers that he and Karen went to bed the night before. He kissed her goodnight, and she started crying.

“I knew exactly why,” Morgan wrote. “After you lose a child, any sense of joy or love you feel comes along with a sense of guilt: I should never be happy. Jerry’s gone.”

“Time To Go”

His wife was crying from suffering, and he felt it, too. He said they each went to sleep surrounded by grief. A few hours later, he woke up, and his legs said it was “time to go.”

“I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked out to the living room with my guitar,” he wrote. “There was a lot of emotion in me, from that moment with Karen the night before and all our months moving through the pain. And something just happened. That emotion and a tune, words—it was my emotion coming into a song. God talking through me. I recorded the lyrics as they came to me.”

When Morgan released “The Father, My Son, And The Holy Ghost” a few months later, he said before the Fox & Friends morning show performance, the song was “tough to write, and tough to perform.”

“It wasn’t my choice to do this,” Morgan said. “I hope that through this song, I can encourage other people to stick with their faith.”

Blake Shelton was Determined to Make Craig Morgan’s Song a Success

Just as the country music community banded behind Morgan in the days surrounding the tragedy, his friends lifted him up again when he independently released “The Father, My Son, And The Holy Ghost.”

Morgan’s longtime friend Blake Shelton stepped up first, becoming a one-man radio promotion team for Morgan.

“I would gladly give up my spot on country radio to get this song on,” he tweeted.

Shelton rallied his social media followers, fellow celebrities, and radio personalities to get behind Morgan’s “The Father, My Son And The Holy Ghost.”

He wrote: “Come on everybody this song deserves to be number 1 at least on iTunes. Tweet your friends, tag the song. All people need to do is hear it once. They will want to own it. This song deserves to be recognized.”

Craig Morgan: “I’m Purely the One Singing the Song. It’s Not About Me”

In the following days, Ellen DeGeneres tweeted about the song, as did Gwen Stefani, Travis Tritt, Ricky Skaggs, actress Angie Harmon, and more.

“The Father, My Son And The Holy Ghost” started moving up the iTunes charts, settling at No. 2 on the country charts and No. 9 on the all-genre chart in a few days.

But Shelton wasn’t finished. He tweeted fellow “The Voice” star Carson Daly and Hoda Kotb to encourage them to keep pushing forward.

The beginning of the song came to him in a dream, which had never happened to him. He wrote lyrics for hours and converted them into the first new song he’d released in years.

“I have heard from so many people already who have said that they had given up on their faith until they heard this song,” Morgan told People. “But I’m purely the one singing that song. It’s not about me. I was just the outlet, the way to get the song to the people who need it the most.”