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‘Is it right on red or left on MLK?’

‘Is it right on red or left on MLK?’

Last updated on: January 8, 2026 at 4:35 pm by Fred Clark

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‘Is it right on red or left on MLK?’ 2026-01-08T16:35:06-05:00 Fred Clark

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Here is a sentence I am pleased to be able to write in 2026: I like the new Amy Grant song.

The song was written by Sandy Lawrence,* but Amy recorded it and is releasing it as the first single for her upcoming new album. So it’s an Amy Grant song now, just like all those old Brown Bannister or Michael Card songs became Amy Grant songs. And so that’s how we’ll talk about it here.

It’s called “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm)” and it is a lamentation.

I’m always leery of using Woodstock or John Lennon as representations of “the ’60s,” but it seems like Amy is too, with that “pity and alarm” bit. The Joni Mitchell reference is odd now, as you realize that any traveler stopping to say, “Hey mister, where’s the road to Yasgur’s farm?” is likely a lot older than the person they’re asking. That “mister” would be the son or grandson or great-grandson of anyone who might have once given such directions to young hippies trying to get themselves back to the garden.

The cover for Amy Grant's 1979 album, "Her Father's Eyes."

I still have “Age to Age” and “Never Alone” on vinyl. I have this one on cassette.

That’s much of the tone of this song — an older person’s rueful, elegy for the lost innocence of youth. The realization that you seem now to have “more memories than dreams,” as the late Todd Snider put it.

Some of that youthful innocence in this song is personal. “A ’60s playlist and a beer, I’m suddenly 16 again,” she sings, and the sepia-toned video dissolves briefly into a familiar Myrrh-records photo of a teenaged Amy Grant.

Wait — hold on a minute … Amy Grant was drinking beer back when she was writing songs like “Old Man’s Rubble” and “Brand New Start” and “Grape Grape Joy”? Scandalous!

News of that would have been a major scandal back then, when Amy was a teenager and the Christian music industrial complex was even younger. That industry spent years sniffing around her for any hint of anything “scandalous” — coming up mostly empty until, finally, her divorce and remarriage to “secular artist” Vince Gill was celebrated as the occasion to finally write her off as an apostate.

One thing I find lovely about the song and the video above is how relaxed she is about all of that. She’s 65 now, and she no longer cares or needs to care about whether or not somebody somewhere will have a sanctimonious freak-out over her drinking a beer. Good for her.

But most of the song’s wistfulness for the big, innocent dreams of youth is not strictly personal. It’s national, and thus political. The politics of the song isn’t exactly straightforward — the “Harper’s Ferry” reference is open to as many different, conflicting interpretations as America can provide of that event, which is a lot. Some see it as a symbol of religious zeal run amok and of violent futility. But some of us still contend that while John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, his truth is marching on, etc.

In any case, there’s less ambiguity about the next line — the one that provides the song’s title. The 6th of January is a reference to the violent raid on the Capitol five years ago, to MAGA run riot, unchecked and unaccountable. And it is an unambiguously negative reference point — one that symbolizes and stands in for America losing its way and betraying its youthful promise and big dreams. It stands for a country that looks toward the future with dread instead of with wonder.

The overwhelming sense of the song is of loss, but it still allows for the possibility (or duty) of hope. That crops up in the verse that invokes Marvin Gaye as a surrogate for that other “the ’60s” — the actual, meaningful, revolutionary ’60s, wherein for the first time in its history, America began to live up to the promise of its second founding and of the Reconstruction amendments that transformed the Constitution into something compatible with democracy and with liberty and justice for all. That, not Woodstock or “Imagine,” was the ’60s that prompted the counter-revolution we’ve all been living through ever since. And that was the moment that still presents us, personally and nationally, with a choice between “right on red or left on MLK.”

The politics of that line in this song are not ambiguous or ambivalent.

Back when Amy Grant was still the reigning Queen of CCM that line, even more than the one about drinking a beer, would have sparked a major scandal that would have wound up with half of NashVegas in flames.

The MAGA evangelical industrial complex in Nashville — what David Dark calls “the Prayer Trade” — won’t be happy to have Amy Grant singing songs like this, but they’re probably not too worried. Remember that time Dolly Parton took the whole country to church by performing a trans-affirming anthem at the Academy Awards like it was a revival meeting? You probably don’t. But that happened, and the Prayer Trade squirmed through it. Then they just let that moment pass and got right back to the business of making sure that everyone good white Christian American knows it’s always right on red, never left and never MLK. The Prayer Trade long ago learned how to manage unruly legends emeritus like Dolly and Willie and Johnny, so they’re not worried about Amy causing too much trouble.

Still, though, it’s encouraging whenever one of those legends — even one of our lesser, niche legends — reminds us that the counter-revolutionary vision of the Prayer Trade isn’t the only vision out there. As David wrote on Tuesday:

I was, I think, 12 when Amy Grant first started dropping by my school to sing songs. At 56 and American and a churchgoer and Tennessean and a Nashvillian, I can feel a degree of despair when it comes to the choices of a number of folks I grew up with, BUT there’s also a bigger number of people in my ambit who seem to know what’s what. Consider “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm),” a recent offering from Amy Grant. She gets it.

It’s a song that isn’t going to be played on the radio. Not on the “Christian” stations and not on the “Country” stations and probably not even on the “Adult Contemporary” stations. And it’s an Amy Grant song that isn’t going to be played or sung in any of the churches where we once all played and sang “El Shaddai” and “Thy Word.” But it’s also a song that helps some of us manage the degree of despair that tempts us to give up, especially on a day like today, when we’re vividly reminded that the counter-revolution can, and will, murder with impunity, as it always has.

But I’m not writing about this song because it makes me feel better, or to revel in the gauzy nostalgia of a once-promising youth, kicking back with friends and enjoying an ’80s playlist and a beer.

I’m writing about this song because it’s Amy freaking Grant and I think that thinking about Amy Grant can help us to understand that nebulous thing called “evangelicalism” — that thing that may or may not be nothing more than a “white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics.”

White evangelicalism is a bearing wall for the white backlash politics of the counter-revolution that has shaped American life ever since the Civil Rights Movement. It is not the only piece, nor is it perhaps the most important piece of that reactionary, white-supremacist political movement, but that movement could not succeed without its support. To paraphrase Albert Barnes: There is no power outside of that church that could sustain white-supremacist fascism an hour, if it were not sustained within that church.

What is it about white evangelicalism that makes it this way? That’s difficult to talk or to think about because the thing itself proves so slippery and elastic and hard to define.

And here is where the example of Amy Grant is useful, because for all of the theological and doctrinal and historiological debates about the definition or meaning of evangelical Christianity, we can say and know two things with confidence: 1) Amy Grant was, for many years, clearly and iconically a person who belonged to the category of “evangelical,” and 2) that is no longer the case.

And no, that’s not just because she recorded a duet with Peter Cetera that became a No. 1 crossover pop hit. Nor was it really because she got divorced and (happily) remarried to Vince Gill.

What happened? Did she change or did evangelicalism change? Or both?

I suspect the answer has a lot to do with the lyric in the title of this post, but we’ll get into that.

Later. For now let me just say, again, here in 2026: I like the new Amy Grant song.

* Sandy Lawrence apparently also introduced Amy to the strumstick she plays on this song.

Lawrence is Jenny Gill’s mother-in-law, which makes her and Amy kin. (“Ex-laws” is what we call it in our blended-extended family, which is similarly irregularly shaped even though ours does not blend two royal houses of Nashville. Family and kinship can be complicated but, also, not.)

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