by Randy Owen
In 1998 we got our star implanted on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you want to step on us, just go to 7060 Hollywood Boulevard in L.A., just east of La Brea Avenue, and look down on the sidewalk.
In 1999, RIAA, the trade group that represents the entire recording industry in the United States, the official body that certifies gold and platinum records, gave Alabama the award for Country Group of the Century. Such an honor is really hard to fathom. I guess they have to wait another hundred years to give out the next one.
I think that going through that awful period and coming out in decent shape made me more comfortable in my own skin, but I also think it gave me a much greater appreciation of what others who suffer must feel, and especially those who suffer in much worse ways than I did. Some historians have said that Franklin Roosevelt became sensitized to the lives of poor people by becoming paralyzed from polio. I think I became more sensitized to, say, children who suffer from cancer, by my comparatively lesser struggle with anxiety and depression. And this might not have happened if I hadn’t hit that wall.
Part of the continuing mission of Alabama, I began to feel even more strongly, was to use the group’s public profile as a jumping-off point to help people who were down and may never get up the rest of their lives. While the love and appreciation you get from fans is genuine and gratifying, there is a love you get from face-to-face contact with people in need that is incomparable. And I have never found this truer than in my nearly twenty-year association with a place in Memphis called St. Jude.
CHAPTER 9
GIVING BACK
I saw the time
When special kids got a chance
And the handicapped could advance
I saw the time
When we walked the streets without risks
And families still prayed, and hugged, and kissed
I saw the time
“I SAW THE TIME” BY RANDY OWEN
Part of the Alabama story, from its very inception, has always been about extending ourselves beyond the business of music and using our name to raise money, raise consciousness, and try to genuinely help the community around us. As a group, we have our collective causes, like the June Jam and the Celebrity Softball Game to aid the Big Oak Ranch, and we each have our separate interests as well. And we’ve been more than recognized for this work, culminating in a great honor for us, the Minnie Pearl Award for outstanding humanitarian and community contributions, given by Country Weekly and TNN in 2000.
We are far from alone in the country-music community in building charity work into our lives. There’s a reason why the June Jam could get twenty-eight major artists to show up to play for free for one concert in the middle of touring season. Probably more than with any other branch of American music, country performers feel the calling to help others. From Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid to Vince Gill’s work with kids with drug and alcohol problems to Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s presence on the scene the minute Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast—reaching out to others is built into the ground-level connection between country artists and their audience, I think. Country stars, most of whom come from humble roots, have a particular affinity for the needs of common people.
I have always been involved in charity work of some kind since we left the Bowery in Myrtle Beach. As we were speeding through the 1980s, in addition to the Jams and golf tournaments and working with the state of Alabama on trying to help farming and farmers, we were constantly bombarded with requests from very worthy charities trying to get our support and involvement. There was no way any of us could have answered all their calls for help and have time for anything else, like making music and giving concerts. I’m sure that if I had wanted to, I could have spent every day of the year appearing somewhere to raise much-needed money for somebody. When I hit the wall in the early ’90s, I had to learn to say no to people I just didn’t have the time or energy to help. As time went on, my work in this area became more and more focused on the situations with which I had a deep emotional connection and where I thought I could do the most good.
And in the middle of it all was St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
A friend of mine, Rhubarb Jones, went to Jacksonville State at the same time as I did and later became a legendary country DJ, a genuine Hall of Famer. He had a morning show in Atlanta and was working to raise money for St. Jude. He wanted me to meet Danny Thomas, the founder and driving force behind St. Jude, and see for myself how impressive he was. Before long I was hopping into the private Alabama plane at four in the morning to fly over to Atlanta to appear on his show and add my name to the cause.
I continued to have contact with Danny, and the more I saw of him, the more my respect for him grew. His passion for the kids at St. Jude was infectious, and I quickly became infected. This was something I felt strongly in my heart. It was, pardon the cliché, a no-brainer.
Danny Thomas was a TV star and show-business entrepreneur best known for his hit network sitcom Make Room for Daddy (later renamed The Danny Thomas Show) in the 1950s and ’60s. Danny founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 1962 on the idea that “no child should die in the dawn of life.” St. Jude takes care of some of the sickest kids in the world, and it does it almost entirely through donations. Seventy-five percent of its funding comes through their fund-raising wing, called the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), also created by Danny Thomas. Kids with leukemia, sickle cell anemia, and other catastrophic pediatric diseases come to Memphis to receive some of the most advanced care available. In 1996 the head of the Department of Immunology at St. Jude, Dr. Peter Doherty, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work with the immune system.
And the kids come there for free.
St. Jude is an enormous operation. When he started it, Danny Thomas promised four things: (1) world-class patient care, (2) a special emphasis on scientific research into the causes and cures of these terrible childhood diseases, (3) the free sharing of this research, and (4)—perhaps most important—no child would ever be denied care because of race, religion, country of origin, or a family’s inability to pay.
Because of this commitment to every sick child, the hospital normally pays all expenses of the uninsured and all expenses of the insured beyond what their insurance pays, beginning with the transportation of both the patient and parents to Memphis. It pays for the lodgings of loved ones, their food, and all ancillary patient costs beyond the direct care of a particular illness, including psychiatric services, if needed, or optometry or dentistry. St. Jude has brought kids from all over the United States and from seventy countries to their facility and in doing so has made great strides in increasing the survival rates of millions of children with devastating diseases. For instance, the rate of recovery from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most prevalent form of childhood cancer, has increased from only 4 percent in 1962 to 94 percent today. That’s Danny Thomas’s legacy.
I like to call St. Jude “The Miracle on Beale Street,” Beale being the legendary Memphis street where blues greats like Louis Armstrong and B.B. King cut their musical teeth.
All of this work at St. Jude comes with a steep price tag, of course. The financial cost for one day of operation at St. Jude is almost $1.3 million. And most of it comes from people like you and me. Last year they raised $592 million through 30,000 fund-raising events around the country. The average contribution was $25.09.
I got a lot of my education about St. Jude from a man named John Moses, former CEO of ALSAC, and from Dick Shadyac. John is from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. An attorney by trade, he got hooked on St. Jude upon meeting Danny Thomas for thirty seconds as a sixteen-year-old boy. I met John in the late ’80s at a St. Jude annual meeting. The organization had become enormously diverse since the hospital opened in 1962 and was as multicultural in its fund-raising as in its admission policy.
John likes to tell a story about me that underscores our friendship and in my mind is both flattering and embarrassing.
In any case, here’s what happened:
John had never seen Alabama in concert, so I invited him and his wife to the York County Fair in York, Pennsylvania, to see us perform before seven thousand energetic fans. I had invited him backstage after the show, but he and his wife started to leave, thinking I’d be too tired or inundated with fans to talk to them. I’ll let John tell the rest: “As we were walking out, the PA system announced, ‘Attorney John Moses, please come to the stage area.’ So we did as told, went through a security check with fifty other people waiting to see Randy, and headed backstage. We found ourselves in a basement of some sort, with green-colored concrete floors that were old and cracking. Randy met with each and every person, signed an autograph, took a picture, and chatted. I was at the very back of the line, and the crowd was pretty much gone. The woman directly in front of me, probably in her forties, was in a wheelchair and had trouble speaking. When it was her turn, Randy took a picture with her, signed something, and then asked, ‘Now, is there anything else I can do for you?’
“She looked up at him and in her very hard-to-understand speech said, ‘Yes. I want you to sing “Angels Among Us” with me.’
“So Randy, without skipping a beat, knelt down on that cold concrete floor and held her hand as the two of them sang ‘Angels Among Us’ from start to finish. There was no photography, no press, no television, no nothing. He was singing the song both with her and for her.
“And I have got to tell you, that was one of the most moving moments of my entire life, and believe me, I have been exposed to a lot of heart-touching moments after decades of working with St. Jude. And I will never, ever forget that image. The two of them, Randy kneeling on this cold cement floor, singing.”
I remember that moment well, and I also remember the endless hours and meetings and red-eye flights and budget sessions and black-tie affairs that John has coordinated to raise the money to keep St. Jude operating. On any given weekend, there are fifty or more events going on around the country to raise money for St. Jude, and John is in charge of every one of them. He probably knows all five and a half million base donors by name.
I like John’s story because it underscores how that song, “Angels Among Us,” became such a big part of the Alabama legacy. The song, written by Becky Hobbs and Don Goodman, arrived after we had just experienced a local tragedy. One of Alison’s high-school basketball teammates had been killed in a car crash after a big game. Randa was only two at the time and peppered me with questions about where this girl was now and why she wasn’t playing basketball anymore and why God had done this to her. She just wanted answers to the questions we all ask. I wanted so much to be able to answer her in a song but didn’t have that song in my head.
Then Becky and Don’s song arrived. Becky had had an experience many years before when a mysterious male voice, perhaps her guardian angel, had told her to be very careful, and soon after while on the road, that warning prevented her whole band from being killed by an 18-wheeler. I heard the song and connected it to the girl who died in the crash. As Randa understood, she was now one of the angels among us. So one day while we were sitting on the couch, Randa asked me to tell her the words to the song again, and I began to speak them to her before I began to sing them. As I recited them, Randa’s little arm got tighter and tighter around my neck. That’s when I knew how I would record the song and sing it onstage.
The song was not initially a popular choice for the band or for the label to add to one of our records. It was not a typical Alabama song, that’s for sure. It is partially spoken and has a children’s chorus in the background. It is also overtly spiritual and inspirational, not an Alabama trademark. But despite the misgivings, we recorded it, and it struck a deep chord with millions of fans like the woman backstage at the York County Fair. I can’t tell you the number of copies sold to date, but if it isn’t our most popular song, it’s pretty close.
We released “Angels Among Us” in 1994 on the Cheap Seats album, and it only made it to No. 28 on the U.S. Country Chart and No. 122 on the U.S. Hot 100 Pop Chart, though it stayed on the Top Singles sales chart for over a year. Since we first put it out, it has become an anthem of hope for many people and a standard at high-school concerts, benefit functions, and funerals. It’s a song I often use in conjunction with charities like St. Jude. Danny Thomas was clearly “an angel among us” who has given thousands of kids another chance in life.
I personally felt an appreciation for the song because it seems to mirror in its lyrics much of the feeling I have always had about the guiding hand of God in my life. I have felt that divine assistance in everything from that early childhood attack of hepatitis, which the prayers of my relatives helped me survive, to all the potential tragedies and missteps I have been able to avoid up to today—including weathering my emotional downturn without destroying all that we had worked to build.
Part of the song says: “When life held troubled times, and had me down on my knees, there’s always been someone there to come along and comfort me.” How would I have survived the crises of my life without the love and support of Kelly and the kids? Thank God, these particular angels were there.
From the first time I met Danny Thomas, I understood the enormous good St. Jude does and the enormous need for funds for them to do it. I stayed involved in St. Jude activities through the ’80s, and as I saw Danny Thomas start to get on in years and his health failing, I felt in my heart that I had to somehow do more. In 1989 Danny was asked to be the keynote speaker at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville. For health reasons, he couldn’t make it, so the St. Jude people asked me to fill in. I wasn’t a professional speaker or anything, but I knew this was something I cared about and could talk from the heart about. Facing all those country-radio programmers and executives from all over the country, I had the perfect opportunity to challenge them to help continue Danny’s dream.
From this impulse was born the idea for Country Cares, which we got off the ground in the late ’80s and which, almost twenty years later, I still consider one of the main priorities in my life.
Country Cares began as a radiothon among national country-music stations to raise money for the hospital. The first year, we used a single DJ in Memphis who then syndicated his appeal to other stations in other markets. It was not a roaring success. In fact John remembers that at the first meeting where he and I met, there was serious talk of scrapping the whole idea. One staffer got up and pleaded that the program continue because the potential was certainly there. Fortunately I realized why it wasn’t working and what we could do to fix it.
We completely changed the format of the radiothon. We made it a local event at each participating station, involving a local radio personality the local audience knew and listened to. The station could run the radiothon over a one-or two-day period whenever they wanted to in the course of the year, and we would supply all the supporting material to make the event both urgent and exciting.
Say the local Minneapolis country station, one of our biggest supporters, cancels all their regular programming for one day to run the Country Cares radiothon for St. Jude. They would play a song by, say, Sarah Evans or Keith Urban, then Sarah or Keith would come on with a direct pitch, followed by testimonies of parents and kids at St. Jude or overview information about the hospital’s mission. If you responded to our call for action, you might come down to the mall where the program was being broadcast that day and pick up an autographed Keith Urban T-shirt in return for a hefty donation. Or you could call a phone bank and make a donation, hopefully one as a “partner in hope,” which was a commitment of $20 a month.
In the end, everybody profits. We have periodic gatherings where radio people come in to meet the stars. The stars do a good deed and make more contacts with the people who play their songs. And they are all there, slapping backs and exchanging phone numbers, in the service of a bunch of very sick kids in a hospital in Memphis.
Today we have 204 country stations nationwide involved in Country Cares
on an annual basis. Teri Watson, a former music director from Los Angeles, is in charge of all Country Care activities full-time. The program has worked better than our wildest dreams. Every city and station has its own method, employing local companies, local advertisers, and local citizens. So far in 2008, Minneapolis holds the record—they’ve raised $2.1 million alone. The most money every raised in San Francisco was the year they had the earthquake. It’s a miracle how much people care.
Since its inception in its current form in 1989, Country Cares has raised $344.5 million, according to John Moses. There is also now a sister enterprise called Radio Cares involving forty-five noncountry stations and a similar effort in the Hispanic radio market that has raised almost $20 million.
To keep this giant ship afloat takes some effort. When needed, I’m on the phone with radio programmers, DJs, and friends in the music business whom we need to make promotional tapes and personal appearances and visits to St. Jude to tape kids and parents and doctors.
Kelly sees all of this going on from her unique, supportive perspective. She’s there when I have to get up from the middle of dinner because some station in California needs me to come on live and talk to their listeners about why this is so important to me. Kelly says it best: “It really doesn’t matter if he and I are passionately taking a bath together or working on a fence post or visiting a sick cow. If it’s that time for him to call at 6:45 in the morning or 10:45 at night, Randy stops what he’s doing and makes the call.”
Probably the greatest pleasure for me involving St. Jude and Country Cares is the opportunity to visit with patients and parents at the hospital. When I’m there, I make an effort to visit every room I can, talk to the kid stuck in that hospital bed, and learn a little more about how he or she is dealing with such an awful situation. And lots of times, kids from Country Cares will show up at an Alabama concert, like the time the audience lights went on and I could read on the back of a little girl’s T-shirt the words I’m Living Proof Country Cares. She was a cancer survivor, and when she came up onstage and told us that, I was blown away. If music is sustenance for my soul, this kind of work is definitely sustenance for my heart.