Vince Gill is highly regarded within the music industry — at least, most of the time — but he claims he almost got into a physical fight with a radio personality named Don Imus back in the early 2000s.
The singer told the story during an appearance on the Naked Lunch podcast, saying that he’d been on good terms Imus for years, right up until he married Amy Grant in 2000.
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That was odd, Gill said on the show, because most people who met Grant immediately warmed to her. But Imus was apparently not a fan.
Why Did Vince Gill Have Beef With Radio Personality Don Imus?
From Gill’s retelling, it seems like Imus took issue with Grant being a Christian singer.
“He flipped on me, he kinda turned on me and started running me down, ragging me on his show every morning,” Gill recounts. “He said, ‘I can’t believe my favorite singer, Vince Gill, lost to baby Jesus, married that Christian girl.'”
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The next time Gill was promoting a new record, he specifically asked for a press stop on Imus’ show, much to his publicist’s bewilderment.
“They said, ‘Well, he’s ragging on you every day.’ I said, ‘I know,'” Gill remembers.
When Imus brought up Grant’s name, Gill jumped at the chance to face the feud head-on. “I’ve been hearing you say some pretty ugly things about my wife, and I’m just kind of curious why,” he recalls saying.
When Imus admitted that he’d never personally met Grant, Gill countered, “If you ever met her, you’d never say an unkind word about her.”
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“I’m gonna shoot you straight,” the singer went on to say. “I really only came on this show for one reason…We’re either gonna talk this out, straighten this out, or I’m gonna crawl across this desk and I’m gonna kick your a–.”
Gill says that Imus’ “eyes got big” and he agreed to “figure this thing out.”
“I said, ‘Good choice, Don,’ you know, and so we had a great visit,” the singer says. After he left the studio, Gill adds that he turned on Imus’ show while he was still on air, and heard him say, “I don’t know why I was giving that guy so much crap. I love that guy.”
The beef was quashed, and Gill and Imus remained friends until Imus’ death in 2019 at the age of 79.
How Long Have Vince Gill + Amy Grant Been Married?
Gill and Grant will celebrate 26 years of marriage on Wednesday (March 10.)
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They share a daughter, Corrina, who was born in 2001. Gill is also dad to a daughter named Jennifer, whom he shares with his ex-wife Janis Oliver, and Grant welcomed three children with ex-husband Gary Chapman before meeting Gill.
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