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North Carolina based country singer Jimmy Wayne and his band open for Brad Paisley at the Comcast Center in Massachusetts in June.
Credit: AP Photo
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What are your plans for New Year's Day? While lots of people will be looking for hangover cures on the first day of 2010, country singer Jimmy Wayne will start walking. And walking, halfway across America, beginning in Nashville, Tennessee. Along the way, he hopes to raise awareness about homelessness in the United States.
Wayne's "Meet Me Halfway" campaign will raise money for organizations that help homeless youth, including HomeBase Youth Services in Phoenix, Arizona, where the walk will end.
No hotels or trailers, either. Wayne will be sleeping out in the elements. How's that for awareness?
"I realize beginning a mission like this in the dead of winter and walking through the middle of the country is going to be difficult, but I hope and pray I am up to the challenge," Wayne said in a statement.
"It's going to be cold, rainy and maybe even snowing and that ground I sleep on at night is going to be really hard. But that's what the homeless are dealing with each and every winter they go without a home of their own.
"Our country is too great for us to have people who are suffering so. And events of the past 12 to 14 months have increased the number of people—especially children and young adults—without a safe place to sleep. We as a nation have got to end homelessness and we've got to help these kids."
It won't be the first time Wayne has experienced homelessness. He grew up in foster and group homes and occasionally found himself homeless as a teen. A North Carolina couple in their 70s, Bea and Russell Costner, took Wayne in when he was 16 years old, and gave him a second chance.
"Bea and Russell took a chance on me, and I was certainly no poster child for adoption," Wayne says.
"I was this teenager with long hair and tattoos, but they saw past that to the scared kid I was. They met me halfway by offering me a place to live and the opportunity to go back to school. But in turn I had to meet them halfway by helping myself, which meant studying, doing chores and following the rules. They provided me with a way to help myself make a life. They gave me a home, love and respect."
Wayne was driven to walk in the past year, he says, due to the amount of people losing their homes to foreclosure and unemployment.
The folks at Marmot Sportswear are sponsoring Wayne's walk, and providing him with cold weather gear. Donations for the walk are being taken at HomeBase and Monroe Harding, a similar organization in Nashville.
Wayne's latest album, "Sara Smile," was released in November and features a remake of the popular Hall & Oates song.
His last disc, "Do You Believe Me Now" spent three weeks at the top of the country charts, and he's toured with Brad Paisley and Dierks Bentley.
Wayne hopes to travel about 25 miles a day this winter, and reach Phoenix in two months.
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