California resident C.J. Sitzes, second from right, is joined by her friends and family members in this portrait taken with Neal McCoy after a concert in Branson, Missouri, in 2022.

Every morning, country musician Neal McCoy grabs his phone, opens up the Facebook app and starts a live video stream, inviting thousands of fans to say the Pledge of Allegiance with him.

The routine started Jan. 7, 2016. Republicans and Democrats were bickering over their 2016 presidential nominees, and the parties’ political battles and infighting were bitter. McCoy was dismayed.

“In my Facebook page, I just wrote the Pledge of Allegiance out, and that was it,” said McCoy, a Longview resident. “And I started getting some comments like, ‘Hey, that’s cool. Are you OK?’ ”

From that day forward, the pledge would be on his Facebook page in one form or another.

When Facebook Live was created that same year, McCoy began live-streaming his daily recitation of the nation’s creed, giving his fans the chance to say it with him and interact with him in the comments.

In the eight years since the tradition started, McCoy hasn’t missed a day. And in those eight years, “saying the pledge with Neal,” as some fans call it, has become more than a part of their daily lives. It’s become a way to find unity in a time of political division.

“The hope that they may get from it is hoping that them and me, like-minded people like us, have not given up on this country,” McCoy said. “You know, even though you don’t always love what’s going on, it’s still a million times better than any other country.”

fort is ‘worth it’

On Jan. 7, for the eight-year anniversary pledge, the “Billy’s Got His Beer Goggles On” star donned a gray hoodie with the words “Did You America Today” and a Texas Rangers World Series Championship baseball cap.

“Well good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Pledge of Alle — lookie here,” McCoy said as he picked up an insulated drink container made to look like the American flag, holding it up for his fans to see. He sat in the cab of his white Dodge truck at his East Mountain ranch — named the Old Glory Horse & Cattle Ranch — on that sunny Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, fans’ comments began to roll in. People said where they’re watching from — Missouri, New York, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, Alaska, and the list goes on. McCoy calls fans out by name. They say the pledge, and the singer stays around to talk for a while.

Jan. 7 marked the 2,924 iteration of that routine. McCoy has said the pledge at his home in Longview, on his ranch and while on tour. He’s proclaimed it in places across the U.S., Mexico, Canada and overseas.

McCoy wasn’t going for a record when he started posting the pledge three presidential terms ago.

“I just did it for a while,” he said. “My dad died probably a year after I started it, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m just going to keep it up.’ ”

McCoy was raised on American values. His father, Pete, served in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Philippines where he met Virginia, Neal’s mother. Virginia raised her children to love God and country, McCoy said. From a young age, the fact that people in other countries have tougher lives and less freedom was impressed upon them.

Those lessons stuck — mostly. McCoy’s brother leads worship, and his sister preaches, at the church the family grew up attending in Jacksonville.

“The black sheep of the family’s out here running around,” McCoy joked that Sunday morning.

The daily pledge used to have hundreds of thousands, even millions, of daily viewers, McCoy said. It now has between 15,000 and 20,000 views per day, a drop he and his fans attribute to a change in Facebook’s algorithms and notifications for users.

The pledge itself only takes a matter of seconds to say. But for McCoy and his fans, the time commitment is greater. Most of the live videos last anywhere from six to 30 minutes, as McCoy chats with fans and reads off historical information they send him for a “This day in history” segment. Even though videos may not be long, he still has to get ready for them and block that time out of his day. He estimates he’s spent about 3,000 hours on the routine.

That effort isn’t unnoticed by fans.

“Just to have your name read is big for people,” said Donna Herring, who watches the pledge from Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her husband, Dave. “I really don’t know of any other celebrities that are that dedicated and that genuine to want to take the time out of their lives to acknowledge the people that support them.”

McCoy’s daily schedule, at least to some degree, revolves around the pledge. He can’t schedule meetings or trips in the morning, and his fans hold him accountable to his commitment, he said.

“But it’s worth it if you just get a few folks come up and say, ‘You know, I really appreciate you saying that and taking the stand. I appreciate that.’ ”

Fans join ‘every single day’

Some of McCoy’s fans have tuned in to the pledge almost as often as he’s said it. Like breakfast, it’s part of their morning drill. But something deeper than hard-wired habit keeps them coming back.

Not so long ago, more Americans started their days the same way McCoy does: Children said the pledge every day in school, said C.J. Sitzes, a McCoy fan from northern California. Now, it’s not as common as it used to be.

“If you look at today, how the kids have grown up — violent, entitled, ungrateful, unappreciative — they took out a lot from schools that need to be in schools, and saying the daily pledge, they need to bring that back in the worst way,” she said.

Sitzes isn’t the only one who feels the same way about the nation. Headlines bear the bad news seemingly every day about crime sprees, shooting and more. Politically speaking, the nation’s politics are more divisive than they’ve been in decades. Public trust in government from people of all political beliefs is at some of the lowest rates in years, according to the Pew Research Center. A 2022 New York Times poll found that about 1 in 5 American say differences of political opinion have hurt their relationships with friends and family members.

Sitzes points to another problem she perceives in modern-day America: a lack of appreciation for those who fought to keep the nation free, like her father, a Navy veteran during the Vietnam War.

To her, the daily pledge with McCoy is part of the solution. Four or five times each week, she puts her hand over her heart and joins him from the West Coast.

“The kids today, they don’t realize the sacrifices that were made, and Neal keeps that alive,” she said. “He keeps it going, and that’s what we need. That’s what everybody needs to remember. We’re not a free country without them, without all their sacrifices.”

Other fans have been equally inspired by McCoy’s patriotism.

Not even surgery could keep Nacogdoches native Retha Tubbe-Todd from her daily time with McCoy. As soon as she woke up from a Dec. 21 operation at a Longview hospital, she watched the day’s video and said the pledge while lying in her hospital bed.

“My heart literally just gets pounding, even after all this time,” she said. “It’s something that I look forward to every single day.”

Saying the Pledge of Allegiance is a way of honoring those who’ve served the nation in the armed forces, including her father and uncle, she said.

That’s why McCoy’s daily pledge “means the world” to her. She redecorated her living room with patriotic items and red, white and blue paint because she was moved by his devotion, she said.

“He’s just a down-home, country, God-loving, country-loving, American-loving human being,” Tubbe-Todd said.

As for the pledge, “nobody put that on him except God,” she said. “I think God put that on Neal to do that, to try to get this country back in better shape and what it used to be, to get people to realize just how fortunate we are to live in the United States.”

Bloomburg, Texas, resident Michael Edwards started watching the pledge a couple of years ago. Since then, he’s gotten military veterans he knows to watch it, and it’s been encouraging to them, he said. Edwards started wearing American flag-themed hats to work at his job in Atlanta, Texas, because of McCoy.

“He’s very patriotic,” Edwards said. “To me, he’s kind of become like a John Wayne to everybody around.”

Standing up against taking a knee

Being an openly patriotic celebrity in 2024 isn’t as widely accepted by people as it once was — even in country music, McCoy said.

“A lot of them, they’ll talk about it a little bit, but not enough to really stick their neck out there,” he said. “And I get it. Some of them that are young don’t want to do anything because it’s tough enough in the music business to even try and get known, to get your name out there. And so, when you’ve worked that hard, you don’t want to do something that could alienate half your audience.

“If you’re going to do something, show your patriotism, you’re going to catch a lot more heck from country music entertainers than you would think. There’s a lot of left-wing.”

McCoy knows country stars will “catch heck” for being patriotic because he has. In 2016, when NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick made headlines for kneeling during the national anthem, McCoy responded with perhaps his most popular tune since the ‘90s, “Take A Knee My Ass.”

“We got death threats to our family, to my kids — it was crazy,” McCoy said.

The song calls for people to respect the flag and the nation’s troops. Three lines of it read: “Is showing some respect too much to ask?/ I speak for those whose freedom was not free/ And I say, ‘Take a knee, my ass!’ “

He figured he’d have ardent supporters, he said. But he also thought he’d face pushback not only from Kaepernick sympathizers, but from those in the Bible Belt who object to the use of profanity.

McCoy tested the song out for the first time on an audience in Branson, Missouri, a popular tourist destination known for its Christian values. He warned the audience that some may enjoy the song while others might take offense. Then the music rolled.

The second time he sang the chorus, the audience gave him a standing ovation, he said. The message he gleaned was this: Like him, the crowd was tired of hearing about Kaepernick’s protest.

While Tubbe-Todd wasn’t in that theater, she was of the same frame of mind.

“It was like he [Kaepernick] had spit in my face when I saw the picture and stuff of him doing that,” Tubbe-Todd said. “It was like he had spit in my face, he’d spit in my daddy’s face … all my loved ones that have fought for our country and our freedom.”

Tubbe-Todd has been a fan of McCoy for years. Her dad, however, never approved of him. In his earlier days, McCoy looked like a long-haired hippie, Tubbe-Todd said. Her father died before McCoy got a hair cut.

When she heard “Take A Knee My Ass,” she went to her parents’ cemetery, blaring the song through her car’s speakers over and over again. She sat by her father’s grave.

“I looked up at the sky and said, ‘Daddy, you see what he’s turned into?’ ” Tubbe-Todd said. “When I said that, it was like all of a sudden, just a calm came over me.”

She speculated that her father might have sent an angel down “to let me know that my Daddy approved.”

The song got more than 5 million views on YouTube, but the platform took it down for failing to meet guidelines, McCoy said.

A pledge that unites

While his patriotic song may elicit controversy, the pledge hasn’t drawn nearly as much, McCoy said.

“I think it’s hard to argue with the Pledge of Allegiance,” McCoy said. “It should be, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. You would think, ‘Who is this offending?’ It shouldn’t be offending anybody, unless you just don’t like our country.”

In times like these, the Pledge of Allegiance is something that can bring people of all views together — not drive them apart, he said.

“It’s one of the reasons I continue to do it,” McCoy said. “Any time you can get people together and agree on something, you’re in pretty good shape.”

Fans agree. And for one fan, saying the pledge with him was a life-changing experience.

Jessica Suto was a truck driver in the Army National Guard based in New Jersey when the Twin Towers were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. She hauled equipment to and from Ground Zero, and for years, she didn’t feel like she could return to the site; she attributed that to post-traumatic stress disorder. Then she found out McCoy would be there Jan. 21, 2017.

She emailed McCoy’s publicist a couple days before, saying she’d like to meet him there. Soon after, plans were made for her to meet McCoy in front of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City.

The temperature was 10 below zero that day as the two stood in front of the museum, saluting Old Glory. They talked for a few minutes, and McCoy, Suto and a friend of hers went into the museum together.

Returning to Ground Zero to say the pledge with McCoy — “someone who loves this country as much as I do” — was an honor, she said.

“It was more healing for me, I think, than anything,” Suto said. “Had it not been for that, I would not have returned before I moved. I would not have gone back there.”

Like McCoy, she said she believes the pledge is something all Americans ought to take pride in.

“That’s not political. It stands for something and what this country was founded on, the brotherhood of everybody being united,” Suto said. “The pledge, to me personally, is what makes this country great. It does bring everybody together, no matter what side of the fence you’re on. It’s one thing that we can all stand on.”

‘We still love our country’

Attendance at McCoy’s shows, at least upon visual inspection, is comprised primarily of folks in their 40s and older, those who heard his crooner’s voice sifting through the speakers of their 1994 Chevrolet 1500s or their 1997 Ford F-150s as they cruised down country back roads and over hills and hollers.

“I understand my audience,” McCoy said.

Quite a few years have passed since the ‘90s country star was topping the Billboard country charts. But McCoy is experiencing somewhat of a second act in terms of popularity. In 2022, a remix of his hit “Wink” featured him and up-and-coming Austin country music star George Birge. In September, McCoy released a new single, “First Time for Everything.”

Country fans’ appetites for ‘90s country may be growing. In 2022, country singer Kane Brown released the album “Different Man,” which some referred to as a “hat tip” to the country sounds of the ‘90s. Brooks & Dunn sang on the album. Music Row magazine wrote about the trend that year, saying millennial and Gen Z listeners were behind it.

“We’ve kind of had a resurgence, us ‘90s country music people, because the young people are listening to that, and they go, ‘You know what? That’s cool,’ ” McCoy said.

Similarly, a number of young people at county fairs and FFA shows have said the pledge with McCoy live on Facebook. They’ve been raised the right way, McCoy said.

As McCoy sat in his pickup near the barn at his ranch under blue skies Jan. 7, he wondered whether people would believe he’s been saying the pledge for eight consecutive years without missing a day.

“Maybe they’ll dig a little deeper and just say, ‘Oh, that’s that guy. Man, he likes — he loves his country, wants other people to love it,’ ” McCoy said.

In the video commemorating the anniversary pledge, Tish Dees spoke for his fan base when she said: “Congratulations, Neal, on saying the pledge for eight years straight. We agree with you: It is a big deal. We love you. Keep going strong.”

That’s the goal, McCoy said.

“There’s a lot of people who just don’t agree with what’s been going on with the country and how it’s being run, but in their minds are still saying, ‘We’re still saying the Pledge of Allegiance because we still love our country,’” he said.