Around 1989, Alabama was the biggest band in country music. The Academy of Country Music had just named them its artist of the decade, and their lead singer, Randy Owen, could have rested between shows. Instead, he kept asking the driver to pull the tour bus off the highway. At truck stops across the country, he would climb down, find a pay phone, and start dialing radio stations. He was not calling about a new single. He was asking disc jockeys to raise money for children with cancer at a hospital in Memphis.
This was before cell phones. The pay phone was the only way to reach a station from the road.
A sharecropper’s son from Fort Payne
Owen did not come to that work from comfort. He grew up on a small sharecropper farm in the hills around Fort Payne, Alabama, where he worked the fields beside his father, harvesting cotton and corn to bring money into the house. At school, classmates mocked his clothes, his scarred farmer’s hands and the cotton dust that clung to him.
At 14 he dropped out to farm full time. He went back two years later, and before he finished high school he had already formed a band with his cousins Teddy Gentry and Jeff Cook. That band became Alabama.
Writing his memoir years later, Owen said it meant revisiting how poor he had been, and that it was not easy.
The meeting with Danny Thomas
The turn came through a friend. Rhubarb Jones, a well-known Atlanta country DJ, had met Danny Thomas, the comedian and television star who founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 1962, and he urged Owen to meet him too.
The two men met in Atlanta. Thomas told Owen plainly that he needed country music’s people to get involved. He believed the country audience was a close-knit family that would rally behind sick children if someone asked.
Owen later said something changed in him after that meeting. His focus moved away from his own success and toward the hospital.
“It wasn’t something that passes by and goes away.”
Owen also toured the hospital with Thomas. At one point they stood at a window looking at a new wing under construction, and Owen asked what it would cost. Thomas told him one hundred million dollars.
Standing in for the founder
Thomas was scheduled to speak to the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, the yearly gathering where the people who program country stations meet. He fell ill before he could go. Owen went in his place.
Standing in front of the industry, he described a nationwide effort in which country stations would raise money for St. Jude. He later said the idea grew from there, with radio people adding their own ideas to it.
Begging from the road
An idea at a seminar did not put a single dollar in the hospital’s hands. Stations had to say yes, and many of them were not ready to.
So Owen worked the phones from the road. He later admitted he chased DJs relentlessly, begging, pleading, and sometimes losing his temper when they turned him down.
Some stations never came around. Decades later, Owen said he still knew who they were. To him, saying no to children in a cancer hospital felt cold, and he did not pretend otherwise.
November 19, 1989
A few country stations had already tried St. Jude radiothons on their own. WKSJ in Mobile raised $178,000 in 1982, and WYAY in Atlanta raised $534,000 in 1987. What Owen pushed for was something bigger.
The first Country Cares for St. Jude Kids radiothon aired on November 19, 1989. It ran for 12 hours, featured 45 artists, and was carried by more than 800 country stations. It raised about $1 million.
The next year, Thomas wrote a letter to country radio asking for its continued support. In it, he described the program as having been born in country, and as country caring. He died in February 1991, a little more than a year after that first broadcast.
The difficult early years
The early national model was not easy. After a couple of difficult years of running the fundraising centrally, Owen’s group made a change: each station would decide for itself how to run its own radiothon. That decision is credited with letting the program grow.
The format that followed is the one many listeners know today. Each year, stations set aside air time, share the stories of St. Jude families, and take pledges from people calling in. St. Jude does not bill families for treatment, travel, housing or food, so those calls help pay for care that families never see a bill for.
From $1 million to $1 billion
By its 25th anniversary in 2014, Country Cares had passed $500 million. Jessica Turri, diagnosed with leukemia at nine, met Owen at the 1998 Country Cares seminar as a St. Jude patient. She later went to work on the hospital’s radio fundraising team.
At the 30th anniversary in 2019, Owen greeted Caleb, who had been a St. Jude patient for 17 years. Caleb’s mother remembered Owen standing on a chair at an early Country Cares event.
In 2024, at its 35th anniversary, Country Cares for St. Jude Kids announced it had raised $1 billion. The country music industry now helps raise more than $70 million for the hospital every year, and a studio on the St. Jude campus carries the names of Randy and Kelly Owen.
Owen has described St. Jude as probably the most important thing he will ever do, apart from being a husband and a father.
In the beginning, he was the one standing at a truck-stop pay phone, waiting for a DJ to pick up. Every year since, it has been country listeners picking up their own phones and calling in.