Country Stars Visit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for Annual Country Cares Seminar
Dozens of country music artists had the chance to experience the joy and hope that St. Jude brings its patients and families last weekend.
Joyful. Hopeful. Life-changing. Those aren’t adjectives one would typically use to describe a hospital, but when it comes to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, those are some of the first words that come to mind.
Dozens of country music artists had the chance to experience the joy and hope that St. Jude brings its patients and families this past weekend when they joined radio stations from all across the United States and Canada, as well as hundreds of music industry leaders, to participate in Country Cares for St. Jude Kids. The yearly seminar is held in Memphis and serves as the annual kick-off to Country radio’s fundraising efforts for the hospital. To date, the program, which was co-founded by Alabama’s Randy Owen, has raised nearly $700 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and is well on its way to reaching the $1 billion mark, thanks to members of country radio and its listeners.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, for those who are unaware, provides treatment, travel, housing, and food to families with children battling childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases at absolutely no cost. Since opening its doors in 1962, St. Jude has helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to more than 80 percent, and promises to never stop until no child dies from the disease.
Throughout the weekend, artists had the chance to tour St. Jude and get a first-hand look at how the hospital runs and just how welcome its patients feel.
Chase Bryant, who has visited St. Jude on several occasions, told us the cause hits very close to home for him. He went on to explain that his brother was diagnosed with Stage IV Leukemia at just three years old. He battled the illness and survived, but unfortunately, his family was left to take care of medical bills for a “long, long, long time.” The fact that patients treated at St. Jude don’t have to pay a dime, blows him away.
“No matter the race, no matter the color, no matter the country, no matter the place you’re from, they have a cure here, completely free,” he admired. That’s one of the reasons he “can’t stop coming back.”
While some artists have visited the facility previously, others, like Cole Swindell, stepped into St. Jude for the first time during the seminar. And just as many of his artists friends told him it would, Swindell said the experience changed his life.
“I’ve never heard anybody talk about anything like I’ve heard people talk about St. Jude and now I know why,” he told Sounds Like Nashville and other reporters after taking a tour of the facility. “Family is everything, but I think when you’re a patient, when you’re here, you are family and that is very clear. I mean [the way] they run this place, it’s first class, and I’m just upset I haven’t been here before.”
It’s the children who have the biggest impact on “Sleep Without You” singer Brett Young.
“My favorite part is the perspective that you get from these kids,” he explains. “They’re dealing with the most difficult illnesses, probably the most difficult thing they’ll ever deal with in their lives, and they’re probably the happiest people you’ve ever seen on the planet. You go home thinking that the things you think are hard or difficult really aren’t so much. So as much as us being here is able to lend some sort of hand, we really I think leave here having taken more from the kids that they got from us. It’s a really special relationship country music has with St. Jude.”
Richard Shadyac Jr., President and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, couldn’t agree more.
“The country music industry has just embraced us in a very unique way,” Shadyac expressed. “There’s a lot of great charities out there, but the country music industry has decided that they want to make a gigantic investment in this mission, and I think that they know that they’re having a tremendous impact on helping kids that have been devastated by this horrible disease, cancer. Every time they come here, I think they grow closer to us.”
If you’d like to join in to help St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and its efforts to end childhood cancer, click the ‘donate now’ button below.
