Keith Gordon Green

Keith Gordon Green was an American pianist, singer, songwriter, arranger, and evangelistic musician born near Brooklyn, New York, on October 21, 1953. His family moved to California when he was young, and he entered the entertainment industry as a child performer and songwriter, signing with Decca Records at age eleven. After years of spiritual searching, Green and his wife, Melody, became committed Christians in the mid-1970s. They opened their home to people in need, and that ministry developed into Last Days Ministries.

Green became a distinctive figure in contemporary Christian music through piano-centered recordings, direct preaching, and an insistence that music function as ministry rather than celebrity. He released albums including “For Him Who Has Ears to Hear,” “No Compromise,” “So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt,” and “Songs for the Shepherd.” Last Days Ministries also published teaching material and supported evangelistic and missionary work. Green died in a plane crash near Lindale, Texas, on July 28, 1982, at age twenty-eight.

His connection with “Create in Me a Clean Heart” requires careful description. Licensing records credit Keith Green as composer of the copyrighted setting, while Universal Music Group and Qobuz metadata for his recording identify the underlying words and music as traditional and Green as work arranger. What is secure is that the familiar Green-associated setting or arrangement was recorded before his death and later released posthumously, while the verbal source is Psalm 51 rather than an original lyric by Green.