In 1989, Randy Owen of Alabama walked to the front of the room at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville to deliver a message that was supposed to come from Danny Thomas. The founder of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital had fallen ill and could not make the trip. Owen spoke in his place, asked country radio for help, and started a program that by October 2024 had raised $1 billion for the children of St. Jude.
An Introduction From an Atlanta Disc Jockey
It started with a friend. Rhubarb Jones, a well-known Atlanta country disc jockey, had already met Danny Thomas and worked on some St. Jude efforts. He kept telling Owen he needed to come over and simply meet the man.
Thomas was a former nightclub comic and the star of Make Room for Daddy. As a struggling young entertainer he had prayed to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of hopeless causes, and promised to build him a shrine if he found his way in life. He kept that promise. St. Jude opened its doors in Memphis on February 4, 1962. Owen later described Thomas as an actor, a businessman and a humanitarian who understood exactly how much country radio and country music could do.
“I Really Need Your People”
“I really need your people to get involved.”
Owen later admitted he did not understand at first. He assumed Thomas meant his band or his fans. It took him a while to realize that “your people” meant the entire country music business: the artists, the labels and, above all, the radio stations.
Thomas also gave Owen a personal look at the hospital. Owen remembered that Danny always had a cigar with him when they walked the halls. At one point Owen asked what it would take to build the new part of the hospital. Thomas told him $100 million. Owen has said he still thinks about that number when he considers how far the program has come.
The Speech He Gave in Danny Thomas’s Place
Thomas was scheduled to address the radio stations gathered for the Country Radio Seminar that year. He became ill and could not attend. The organizers turned to Owen.
“They asked me to speak to the people at CRS in his stead.”
Owen said he simply told the room what he thought Danny would have said, laying out the idea of a nationwide effort to raise money for the kids at St. Jude. He also reminded the broadcasters that the attention they and the artists enjoyed came with a responsibility.
“We have an opportunity to do a tremendous amount of good.”
He was not a small voice in that room. In 1989, Alabama had three No. 1 country singles. One Phoenix program director who was in the audience went home and put one of the first St. Jude radiothons on the air later that year.
Some later biographies say Owen gave the speech after Danny Thomas had died. That is not correct. Thomas lived to see the program begin and died in February 1991, about two years after he first asked for Owen’s help.
A Million Dollars, and a Slow Start
The first official Country Cares radiothon went on the air on November 19, 1989. It was planned to run 12 hours, with 45 artists, across more than 800 country stations. It raised about $1 million, well short of what organizers had hoped.
The next couple of years were hard. Eventually the organizers stopped trying to run one central broadcast and let each station decide what would work for its own listeners. That change is what allowed the program to grow. In 1990, Thomas wrote personally to country radio, telling stations the partnership was one they would be proud to accept.
Counting Toward a Billion
The totals climbed slowly and then quickly. By 2007, when Danny Thomas’s son Tony presented Owen with the St. Jude Founder’s Award, Country Cares had raised more than $310 million. By 2014 it had passed $500 million. Owen called the partnership the “Miracle on Music Row” and said he hoped he would live long enough to see it reach $1 billion. He repeated the goal in 2015 and again in 2020, when he said he had been praying to stay around until it happened.
About two decades after he started the program, Owen received a cancer diagnosis of his own. He has said it made him understand St. Jude families in a new way and only deepened his commitment.
On January 25, 2019, during the 30th anniversary seminar, St. Jude dedicated a patient family room in the Kay Research and Care Center to Randy, his wife Kelly and their family. By then the total stood above $800 million.
On October 22, 2024, at the 35th Country Cares gathering in Memphis, ALSAC president Richard Shadyac Jr. announced that the program had passed $1 billion. A studio on the St. Jude campus was dedicated to Randy and Kelly Owen the same week. Because of donors like these, St. Jude families never receive a bill for treatment, travel, housing or food.
Five More Years
Owen has always said that time matters more than money, and that what counts is giving and then staying involved rather than walking away. For years he was uncomfortable when families thanked him. In 2015 he described one from Iowa that had been able to spend five more years with their child. What helped him accept that kind of gratitude, he said, was thinking about his own father.
“If I could spend two weeks more with my dad.”
He has called St. Jude the most important thing he will ever do, apart from being a father and a husband. Over more than three decades, he said, he has watched children he met at St. Jude grow up into healthy adults.