After writing a recent post about Keith Green, it sparked my interest into learning more about him. I’d always appreciated his music and I knew he had been killed, but I wasn’t sure about any of the details above those items.
A quick search on YouTube provided more videos and Wikipedia provided a history of his life and an eye-opening look at his ministry and details about his untimely death.
Perhaps most interesting to me was that he was being marketed and promoted as teen heart throb but was suprisingly overshadowed when Donny Osmond burst onto the scene to compete with the spotlight at the same time.
Decca Records planned to make Green a teen-idol, regularly getting the young pre-teenager featured in fanzines like Teen Scene and on popular television shows like The Jack Benny Show and Steve Allen‘s show. When Green was twelve, Time magazine referred to him as “a prepubescent dreamboat”.[6] His dreams of stardom were shattered, however, when Donny Osmond stole his short-lived spotlight and Keith’s newfound stardom was quickly forgotten by the public.
and here are the details of his death
Keith Green died on July 28, 1982, when the Cessna 414 leased by Last Days Ministries crashed barely after takeoff from the private airstrip located on LDM property. In order to give visiting friends an aerial tour of the LDM property and the surrounding area, the small plane carried eleven passengers and the pilot, Don Burmeister. Green and two of his children, three year old Josiah, and two year old Bethany, were on board the plane, along with visiting missionaries John and Dede Smalley and their six children. All on-board the seven-seat aircraft were killed.
Among several causes, the NTSB determined that the crash was largely due to pilot error. With eleven passengers on-board, the aircraft was considerably overloaded at nearly 450 pounds (202 kg) overweight. Additionally, the plane’s lift-off from the runway was ruled to be premature. The NTSB further determined that Last Days Ministries, as lessee of the aircraft, had not complied with their insurance company’s requirement that the pilot attend a Cessna pilot training school before operating the aircraft.
The video at the beginning of this post is of probably his most famous song as well as my favorite. My favorite line is “But Jesus rose from the grave, you can’t even get out of bed.”
