Lightning strikes a chord

When Danny Griego, of Weatherford, was in college, he went fishing along the eastern New Mexico border, unaware his life was about to change forever. 

Lightning struck Griego and blew him about 40 yards, paralyzing his right arm and briefly stopping his heart. During Griego’s recovery, his neurosurgeon told him if he learned to play guitar it would help rehabilitate the motor skills in his hand. 

So Griego picked up his grandfather’s guitar and began playing. 

“My music career started abruptly with a bolt of lightning,” Griego said.

“Then another thing happened,” Griego said. “I started waking up with really vivid dreams in song, so I started sleeping with a tape recorder by my bed … In the middle of the night, whatever would come to me I’d put it in the tape recorder.

As Griego likes to call it, he got bit by the “honky tonk bug.”

Griego was born in Arizona, but after finding his love for music, he “rambled all over the Southwest, picking in all those one-horse towns which grew into playing rodeos. And one road led to another,” he said. 

He then found himself in Nashville, which played a key role in building connections with highly respected country music artists and songwriters like Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver, Augie Meyers, Red Lane, Hank Cochran, Max D. Barnes, and John D. Loudermilk – who spent time mentoring him to help grow his career. 

Griego is both a singer and a songwriter and feels most inspired when he gets out of his own way and lets the creative process flow, he said. 

He likes to record songs like “it’s 1960, we just go into a big recording hall with a bunch of really talented musicians and see what creativity brings,” Griego said.  

Through his creative process, Griego maintains the goal of reaching people through his music. 

“You take the sword that you forged, and you go out into the world and wield it,” he said. “It’s wonderful being able to move people and bring them to think about things and talk about this journey of life that we have…I think that’s what the gift is for. It’s for healing people.”

Mission in action

Griego has been recognized as a Top 10 Billboard recording artist, and his single “Angelina” climbed to No. 10 on the Mediabase Published AC Chart for the week ending May 23. 

Since his accident he said, “I wake up with a totally different attitude of, ‘OK, Lord, what’s today look like? What’s our mission today?’” So, through each success Griego enjoys, he finds a way to inspire meaningful action to listeners and bring light to underserved communities. 

He splits time between Weatherford at his ranch, Freedom Horse Ranch, and Nashville, creating music and giving back to people, specifically veterans. Doing so through projects like the song “Twenty-Two,” which shines light on the veteran suicide rate, and his most recent project (to be released soon) alongside Eddie Wright, a recon Marine veteran who lost both arms and part of his leg in combat in Fallujah, Iraq. They partnered at Griego’s Nashville house and produced “Thangs,” a song about what Wright has been through, because “it’s not widely known some of the horrific things that those veterans have gone through for our freedom,” Griego said. 

When Griego’s not holding a guitar he’s hosting equine therapy “to show people they have a place” at Freedom Horse Ranch. Through the therapy, individuals like veterans, first-responders, and special-needs children learn coping tools to improve their daily life. 

“In the time that I have left with the gifts that I’ve been given, I just wanna help people,” Griego said. “There’s a whole bunch of people out there in that community that don’t know that they’re loved, and that they’re appreciated, and that they’re cared for, and that’s one of the primary things I want to let them know is that we love them and we thank them for guarding our wall.”