Leave Nothing To Chance

 

John Solleder continues his two-week special with Bill Nash, who talks about his colorful songwriting career and how it impacted his life. This time, Bill shares the most memorable people he worked with and the most interesting projects he took on. He goes even deeper with his collaboration with Reba McEntire and the unique process behind Diamond Rio’s In God We Still Trust. Bill explains his time spent with Roy Orbison, Blake Shelton, and Perry Como, as well as how he met Johnny Cash as a teenager. He also discusses the inspiring story of boxerTermite Watkins, with whom Bill now partners with to help children at Champions Kids Camp.

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Bill Nash Saint, Sinner, Singer Part 2

Bill, welcome to our show.

I appreciate you all for including me in it. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you guys. Thank you for having me.

Thank you, first of all. I want to ask you if we can double back to the last episode a little bit with Reba at the Astrodome and you were meeting her mom and talking about the song that you wrote for her. Tell that story.

She kept the song and released it in November of 1994. It was shortly around Thanksgiving time. I can’t remember. If you don’t mind me saying a personal thing about it. I was taking my sons to school that morning. We knew it was out as a single but we’d never heard it on the radio yet. That was one of the things I was waiting for. I couldn’t wait to hear Reba sing our song on the radio.

We’re driving to school and it comes on. It was perfect timing. The guy says, “Here’s Reba McEntire singing her new single, They Asked About You.” My son, Billy, says, “Dad, she’s singing our song.” I love how they take ownership right away because it’s part of the family. They knew how exciting it was. They weren’t sure who she was but they were only 8 and 10 years old. They found out who she was because they got to go to her office and meet her that day.

 

I got all sidetracked thinking of that thing there with Reba and the song. When the song ended, the disc jockey said, “That’s Reba. The caliber of that song is incredible as all of the songs she picks.” That was it. My sons are hearing what a great songwriter their daddy is from a disc jockey on the radio. I love that part. I like that. I didn’t solicit that, where they tell everybody how good you are because you can’t.

We found out that Reba was going to be singing in Astrodome. I forget what date it was but it was the next year after our song came out. We watched it climb the charts. That album, six weeks after it was released, went number one. You’re almost like, “My dream has come true out of that. Lord, thank you.” I love this part. My wife’s grandfather was telling all his friends. He was a pastor of a church in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, that he had started 40 years earlier. It became one of the largest churches in that religion that they had and started a school and everything.

He was telling all his constituents, “My granddaughter, Kimberly, has an office right next to Reba’s in Nashville.” She didn’t know the writer’s rooms were down the hall. If you’ve never been to a writer’s room in a publishing company, it’s uninspiring. It’s a room. In her old offices, we had an office that didn’t have a window to the outside. It’s one of the things you learn to covet when you’re writing songs. You can look out and the birds are going on the trees, in the wind, in the rain or whatever is going on. We had a room and had a picture of a window and it said, “I hope you’re happy.”

We had signed with Reba to write for her, by the way, in the meantime after the song was coming out. We flew home to watch Reba sing our song. She also had a huge hit on a song that most of your people will be familiar with called Does He Love You. She did a duet with Linda Davis. Linda turns out to be a great friend of ours.

To increase that trivia, her daughter ends up being a third of Lady Antebellum, the incredibly famous and popular singing trio. They wrote a huge song. They’re great artists. Linda’s little girl, when she was ten, they invited us to come and bring Jimmy over to their apartment because they were doing the song. Linda is an incredible singer. If you ever listen to Does He Love You, she’s the other woman voice that’s singing with Reba. She matches Reba on every note.

I know it’s hard to believe there’s another woman alive that can sing like Reba besides Dolly Parton, of course but Dolly has a different style. These two women could sing. It’s interesting that Linda Davis’s little girl turns out to be a huge star. She and Jimmy are friends from high school and grade school days and even doing a song over at their house. We became great friends with Linda and her husband. We played on the Reba McEntire baseball team. I was the centerfielder for the baseball team. It was quite a fun year.

We come back home to Houston. We fly in to see Reba in the Astrodome. She and Linda knocked it out of the park. Out song, They Asked About You, they did that. They did Does He Love You. The crowd was screaming and hollering more. Do you know how they do it in the big arenas? They stomp on the floor so loud that the whole place feels like it’s going to shake and maybe collapse. They re-sang the songs and it was a moment in time. We were sitting in the stands crying and everybody else was having a great time, “Why are these two people crying?” It’s because we’ve made it here to this level and it was something you never forget.

Never forget God when He finally brings you to the level you are always praying for. Click To Tweet

I thank God for that experience and the fact that I never gave up hope, only a few times. When people tell you that they stuck it out through the whole thing, I didn’t. I failed in my hope from time to time. I remember laying my head in my wife’s lap on the couch at home in Nashville. We were renting before we got the Reba hit and then we bought the thing. I’m laying there and going, “It’s bad. Nothing is going right.” I’m blubbering. That didn’t do me any good. As I think back about it, you know you wasted most of the morning doing that. When you try to get going again, you are trying to get going and making yourself move.

A year or so later, we’re in Nashville and I’m listening to Reba McEntire doing our song. It was like, “What a payment for that crazy moment?” We’ve never forgotten it and I’ve never done that again. It’s like what they tell you, don’t tell your subconscious mind that you’ve lost or that there’s no hope. Your subconscious mind hears that and repeats it to you. What do you say to it? My faith is, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I’m not done. That one little chapter might be over but I got something else.” Where one door closes, another opens. That’s the truth. Grab onto that.

Sometimes you don’t want to be positive when a negative thing has happened to you. It’s like, “Don’t tell me any positive. I want to be mad for the moment.” You can do that but it’ll cost you. I’m suggesting that you stay positive with it and be quiet for a while. Go to a place that you know that God can meet you there and say, “Lord, please help me. I need you. Encourage me. Send me something. Give me a sign that I’m still going to make something happen.” Something will happen. Somehow and invariably something comes across that makes you realize what’s going on.

At this time in our country, we see all this stuff. I’m not going to categorize each thing and bring it all up. Everybody knows what I’m talking about. This too will pass. All we got to do is we got to exercise our right to vote and quit telling these people that hate America, “What are they doing in congress?” If you hate America, you should not be allowed to be in our congress. We love America. I won’t be in any more politics deeper than that.

That’s okay because I feel the same way. We’ll save that for another show. You wrote the song In God We Still Trust by Diamond Rio.

Yes. It was quite an experience. I would like to take the whole credit for it, of course. We were writing on a project for someone and the project called for a patriotic song. When you start trying to write a patriotic song, I would be, want to be or even people that are songwriters, you’ll know that we start going through all the ideas. You have what we call a session where everything is in. Any suggestion is in. Let’s run down that road for a minute and see if anything comes up. We got one nation under God. There are several other things.

My wife said, “On the dollar bill, it says, ‘In God we trust.’ What about if we said, ‘In God we still trust?’” We all went, “Why not?” She said, “I can write that.” What I didn’t know at the moment is she was not only rooting that idea. It came to her. When you have an inspiration that comes over, you put it down on tape right then, write it down, whatever you have to do. If you have a tune to it, learn the number system that goes with the tune. We’re on an octave scale so it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. They call the number eight a new beginning because it’s the same 1/8. That’s the same note and it’s an octave apart. That’s what you call them. It’s a new beginning. The day of new beginnings.

She started writing lines down and we adjourned for that session. We went out and about. The next couple of mornings, at 2:30 AM, my wife sat out there in the living room pounding on the piano. I don’t mean playing. I mean, “Bang, bang, bang.” That’s her style of playing. I said, “Kim, that’s loud.” I’m not sure what the technique is, “Bang, bang, bang.” She was pounding out the tune to In God We Still Trust. She has some words written down.

The next morning when I got up, she got up about 12:00 PM because she stayed up most of the night writing on that song. She passed these words by me. I had a suggestion for 2 or 3 words. She wrote, “When our Founding Fathers bravely formed this nation, they spoke of Him as our Creator as they wrote their declaration. He was there from the beginning. That’s how we’ve come this far. I have faith in him throughout our history and made us who we are.”

I write it all up. We made a demo of it. We presented it to my friend, Ray Pillow, who was on the Grand Ole Opry for 52, 53 years before he finally retired. He is battling Alzheimer’s. We talked on the phone. We went to Nashville. George Morgan has a daughter. Her stage name is Lorrie Morgan. She had a hot chicken place in Nashville that she had created. She was in the restaurant business for a moment as well as being on the Grand Ole Opry as well as being an RCA recording artist.

Her daddy, George Morgan, I had known him from when my family was singing gospel music on Columbia Records. He was on Columbia. Me and him got to sit next to each other in the green room. We talked to each other. I had a picture of me and him and I gave it to Lorrie. We were eating lunch at her place. After lunch, Ray and his wife went to leave and I said, “Ray, here’s this song I want you to listen to.”

He starts his car and he puts the tape in. This was the year 2000 or something like that. We’re leaving out of the parking lot and I came out this way and he was already out there. He then starts honking his horn and had his window rolled down. He’s waving his arm at the window. It was like, “What does he want?” That was before cell phones. We get to where we’re going and I called him and said, “What?” He said, “Bill, I want to pitch this song.” I said, “Please, pitch it to whoever you want.”

This is an interesting story, John. People always picture in the Elvis Presley movies how they would present a song to Elvis. Everybody’s in a coat and tie and they’re in the business office. Do you know that none of that is true? Ray Pillow calls up Marty Roe of the group Diamond Rio, “Marty, let’s play golf.” Marty is a big golfer and so was Ray Pillow. “Where do you want to do it?” He said, “I‘ll meet you at the Waffle House.”

 

They meet at the Waffle House. They go in and they’re having waffles and stuff. When they go outside, Ray says, “Marty, come on over to my car. I got to play you a song.” He puts him in the car in the front seat and there they are and he plays In God We Still Trust. Ray Pillow told me that Marty had his head in his hands, thinking and looking. When the song ended, he didn’t raise his head. He was still sitting there with his head in his hands.

Ray is looking at him and says, “Marty, what do you think? Is it any good?” He looks up and says, “Ray, it’s great.” Ray was like, “I did good.” It ended up on their last album for RCA Records. This never happens, by the way. They put the record out. He introduced the song to America. They said that there was some pushback. I don’t know who they are. They don’t believe in America and don’t love God. Marty explained it. He said, “It’s their right to do what they think.”

We had an onslaught of people that love this song. They loved it so much. Marty and the guys were closing their show with it then and they never failed to get a standing ovation for the song. They got signed to Word Records because their RCA contract was over. They went right to Word, which is a Christian label. They re-recorded In God We Still Trust. That never happens but they did it because they still close their shows with it.

There have been several videos. It’s been recorded 50-some odd times. Go to YouTube or Google and google In God We Still Trust. You’ll see there are many people that have cut this song from the Christian world to the country world to the patriotic things. They still fly. Kim and I are around the country singing it as special deals for veterans. We’ve used this song innumerable times. We’ve found such great acceptance. It’s been a viral hit three times around the world. They didn’t rest for a couple of months.

This is a funnier story. The guy who was our interface in Nashville at the first publishing deal, we called him the guy that taught us to write songs. Jerry Taylor is no longer with us. God bless his soul. Jerry sent us a video of Diamond Rio doing our song and he said, “Billy and Kim, you got to hear this song.” He didn’t know we were the writers. We said, “Jerry, you should’ve known that was part of your work. We wrote those songs.” He went, “My god.” It was one of those. I had to share it with you guys.

Let’s play Word Association for a couple of minutes. You’ve known many people. We’re going to miss a bunch. A couple of people that come to me are iconic, to say the least. Johnny Cash. I know you knew Mr. Cash. What kind of guy was he?

When I was with my family, The Nash Family Trio on Columbia Records, we were sent from New York. Our first album was made in New York with Perry Como’s producer, Ernie Altschuler. I was only fourteen years old and my brother was eighteen. He was hitting us up at the time and he said to my mom, “I’m going to send you all to Nashville for your next album.”

Johnny Cash’s producer, Mr. Don Law, he’ll understand gospel music better. Country music and gospel music are tightly intertwined. Johnny Cash used to put a gospel song on every album of his that went out to the world. I don’t know if you guys knew that but that was one of the things he did. They put us with Don Law and we go to Nashville to record. At the same time, we’re having a disc jockey convention in those days.

The first time I ever met Johnny Cash for real, we were staying in the same hotel he was for this convention in Nashville. I’m not sure where he was living at the time but he was staying at this hotel. The elevator doors open and Johnny was about 6’1”. I was only 5’7″ and 135 pounds at 14, 15 years old. There’s Johnny Cash and he still had on a tuxedo shirt with that long jacket he wore. The elevator doors open and there I am starstruck standing and he said, “How are you doing?” I said, “I’m doing great. How are you doing?” He’s like, “I’m doing fine.” He walked out. He’s so friendly you’d thought we’d known each other all our lives.

The next day, at the Ryman Auditorium, which is where they do the Grand Ole Opry in those days. They didn’t have Opryland at the time. This was at Ryman. I’m standing backstage and The Nash Family Trio opened the show and Johnny Cash was the closer. They had all the other country acts on. Marty Robbins was part of that opening.

I didn’t know who they were at that time as much as maybe I should have. I was steeped in gospel music. I didn’t listen to country music. I was listening to rock and roll and gospel. Marty bled over when he did El Paso. It crossed over the country lines to the pop lines and all across the radio. It sold five million singles in a day. If you sell 50,000 singles, it was a number one hit record. That was the difference between a pop singer and a country singer.

Marty passed over that and Johnny Cash did too with I Walk the Line. Johnny wrote that song as well. It crossed over the country line into the rock and roll world. It was number one on and on. That day, the whole audience is out there waiting for Johnny Cash. I’m standing right beside him backstage. Our producer, Don Law, was on the other side of Johnny. June Carter is in the mix there with us. I’m standing there. I keep looking over at Johnny. There was June. She was such a pretty gal. She was sweet to all of us. Do you want to hear a real inside story?

It’s in my book, by the way. Everybody, get my book. In this book, there’s a story. I’m standing there by Johnny. The emcee of the show is Carl Smith. People that know country music are going to know who Carl Smith is. He was an artist from Columbia Records as well. He was emceeing this whole show. I’ve got it hanging on my wall of twelve Columbia recording artists from Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Chuck Wagon Gang and on and on. There are twelve and we’re part of that twelve. We’re on that album with all these stars. It was cool. Here’s the back story. Carl Smith used to be married to Johnny Cash’s then-wife, June Carter. She and he were married first and got divorced. Imagine that, a couple of showbusiness divorcing.

Smith is looking over at all of us standing in the wings on this big old Grand Ole Opry stage. We’re over in the wings waiting for him to introduce Johnny Cash. He knew what he was doing, believe me. June Carter, his ex-wife, is now married to Johnny Cash. He made a comment. Johnny Cash took off like a shot and headed toward Carl.

Carl expected it, believe me. He knew what was going to happen. He was on the stage and Johnny is in the wings. Carl Smith takes off. He runs around to that side of the stage and Johnny Cash is in hot pursuit. They chase each other around this whole circumference stage. The crowd was shocked and going, “What’s happening?” Johnny never could catch Carl because Carl was the smaller guy and faster. Thank God he was because Johnny would have knocked him from here to eternity. We were laughing over there. What a moment.

Bill, the greatest part of doing these shows is having backstories on stuff. That’s the stuff you’re never going to see or hear unless you’re a part of it. Let me ask you about another guy who was such a giant, Roy Orbison.

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I never got to meet Roy and I wanted to. The closest I ever got to Roy was my mom and I was walking down the streets of Nashville that same time we’ve done this convention and here goes Roy Orbison driving by in a brand new white Cadillac. He had a shirt in the back window hanging up there. On the back of it, it had the record label that he was on.

You couldn’t miss Roy. He’s a different-looking guy. He didn’t look like a star. The guy was such a great singer. They countered him because he had an operatic country voice. I don’t even know if you can put those two terms together, opera and country but he did. He wrote all of his hit songs too. He was a writer’s writer. It took a voice like his, “Running scared each place we go.” The hook line, “You turned around and walked away with me.” The whole thing goes out through the roof.

Let me give you all a little inside. The guitar player on Roy Orbison’s albums, singles, all of those, do you know the lick that you hear on Pretty Woman? That was Jerry Kennedy, my producer, at Mercury Records. He was an incredible guitar player. Jerry Kennedy toured with Roy in Europe sometimes when he went. Jerry Kennedy named one of his sons after the record producer, Shelby Singleton. He was a famous record producer. Shelby had some of the songs that went there.

Jerry Foster was a writer we wrote with. Foster and Rice, if you google those two guys, they were some of the biggest, most successful songwriters of all time. We wrote with Jerry Foster. Roy Orbison’s producer’s last name is Foster. Stephen Foster’s heritage. Stephen Foster from the 1800s wrote one of my favorite songs of all time and Roy Orbison recorded it. That’s who produced Roy Orbison. Stephen Foster wrote this most beautiful song.

Let me ask you about two other guys. This is funny because we talked about this. Before I’m on AOL and for the third time, Perry Como’s name pops up. Some of our younger audience isn’t going to remember Perry Como. I grew up on his Christmas show. I knew it was Christmas time because right after Thanksgiving, it’s that Perry Como Christmas special every year. I know you knew him a little bit as well.

I met his record producer, Ernie Altschuler, in New York. That’s who did our first album. I never got to meet Perry in person. One of the most beautiful songs that Perry Como ever did is called It’s Impossible, “It’s impossible. Tell the sun to leave the sky. It’s just impossible.” That song is a song that was first a song in Spanish called Somos Novios. Somos Novios in Spanish means we are boyfriend-girlfriend. That melody was beautiful. It then got rewritten in English and Perry Como sang it. It was a huge hit for Perry.

I was still hosting a television show in Philadelphia at WCAU with Betty Hughes. She was Richard Hughes’s wife. Richard Hughes was the governor of New Jersey. That would be about 1970. It was a summertime show and I was there for the whole summer. I got there earlier. It lasted into the summer. I started in January. I’ve never lived in snow, ice, gloves and layering. I had to learn to layer. All I had was a jacket that you wear on tour, a tour jacket of somebody. It was 28 degrees outside in Philly. It made your bones hurt to hit that cold air.

I’d be on my way to the TV station and I shook all the way. I didn’t live that far from there and my care barely got warmed up in time to get to the station. I came in and my teeth were chattering. I remember my producer saying, “You got to get yourself winter clothes.” My name was Michael Brennan at that time. I had signed with Capitol Records after being on Columbia with gospel or Mercury with the country. They were trying to get me to be a whole new artist as a pop artist. The same guy that wrote Johnny Mathis’ Chances Are. I made up my own words to Chances Are. Do you want to hear it?  “Chances are when you smoke a big cigar, your car will smell like a cigar. Your chances are awfully good.” I’m sorry for the corn.

Speaking about corn, Hold Him Under is a preacher.

You got to see me with that on there, Keith. You have a little bit of an advantage over, John because he didn’t have that. There’s a song that I don’t know whether to tell you the words to it first and then tell you the reaction that my wife had to us not recording it. The songwriter’s name was Don Goodman. Goodman got three pages of what we call a discography, meaning this is who cut this song. This was before Blake Shelton was a big star. He’d come into Nashville. He’s 6’2”. He’s handsome. He can sing. He’s talented. Don Goodman also wrote this song called Hold Him Under and pitched it to us.

We wrote a lot of songs with Don Goodman because he liked our writing. I was blessed to have done so. One day, Goodman is in our house. He says, “Bill and Kim, I got to play you all this song.” He was sitting and waiting to do a demo session at a studio and they got bored. This happens. Sometimes the guys that are in that recording, before you get there, get hung up. It takes a lot.

It says, “It was neat in old Brush Arbor. One stormy summer night, lightning cracked, I jumped back and thought I had seen the light. I commenced a hollering. Wash my sins away. As my head went beneath the water, I heard my mama say. Hold him under just a little bit longer. Stand on his throat. Don’t let him up until his feet start to float. If he hollers hallelujah, he’s telling one more lie. Hold him under until he’s over on the other side.” That’s the first verse. My wife said, “No, we’re not recording that one.” Our friend that helped us get started with Championships Kids Camp in Houston was with us at the time. He said, “You got to cut that.” We cut it. Do you know it’s our most requested song of all time?

I believe it. Bill, we talked about Champions Kids Camp a little bit on the prior show. You have your big annual golf event. One of the guests there is an interesting guy in his own right who you’ve been working with, Mr. Termite Watkins. Tell us a little bit about Termite

When Termite was born, his dad owned an extermination company, exterminating pests, roaches, mice, rats and all that. When Termite was born, his real name is Maurice. His dad called him Termite. As Termite got older, he liked it. Nobody knows why. He was the youngest boxer in history. There are some stats on him that I wish I had brought down here with me.

They fought for the World Championship in a double main event with Muhammad Ali. Muhammad was fighting for the World Championship of the heavyweight division. Termite was fighting for the lightweight division. They went the full fifteen rounds and they would knock the other one out. It was on points. It was close. Half of the country thinks that Termites won that fight. Out of his 68 professional fights, he knocked out 58 of his opponents. That’s unusual for a lightweight.

Termite I had quite a career on and on. After that fight, he retired. He went back into the family business with his dad, exterminating. When you get that famous, people know who you are. The federal government called him and they said, “Would you go to Iraq?” We’re in the middle of the Iraqi war. They got an airbase there that’s got a problem with mice and rats, “Would you go take care of that problem?” He told me the story. I’m trying to remember how it came about.

They also asked him, “We want to send you a group of twenty Iraqi men. We want you to teach them to box. We want you to do your best to get them in the Olympics.” First of all, to take guys that are already grown and haven’t been raised in boxing, how do you teach them that to the skill level that they could compete? Secondly, how do you get them in the Olympics? We got a peace thing going on with Iraq, etc. It was a goodwill thing.

Do you know that he did that? He had twenty guys that he talked to box and he got them in the Olympics through his rapport with the federal government and with the Olympic Committee. He was well-touted. As a child, he was raised in the church but he got away from God. It’s like my story. Through all those years, he got into drugs and alcohol. He spent so much money on the nose candy, let’s call it. He’s got a boxing gym behind the church that he works with. He’s a minister there. He has taken many of those kids, those young boys that come to the gym to learn to box. They’re in gangs.

In the part of Houston where he’s at, there’s a gang on that corner and a gang on the other corner. He’s won many of them to the Lord. They have an unspoken word. When you go to Termite’s boxing gym, you do not take your guns, you do not fight and you do not get in any altercation. It’s peace. They enter the gates with that in his gym.

What’s happened is Sylvester Stallone has come along and said, “Termite, we need to make a movie of your life.” He signed the deal. There’s a full-length, full-feature motion picture of his life. I’ve already submitted a song for them to use for his title song like The Rocky theme and it’s called Balboa Productions. Can you imagine? Where did they get the name, Balboa? Maybe from Rocky Balboa. That’s Sly Stallone’s company. It’s going to be a big deal.

The scriptwriters have asked for an extra month to finish the script because there’s so much to get to. His career spans many years. He was such a great fighter. He loves people and he loves kids. He’s going to be bringing some of his people to our Champions Kids Camp. We’re going to be bringing some of our kids that would like to learn to box to his boxing ring. The boxing ring that he has in his gymnasium is the one that Muhammad Ali fought his last title fight in Houston. When the fight was over, they gave the entire ring to Termite. Termite has it down there in his gym. I got pictures with him in that ring.

It’s been a great and fun thing. He invited me to his indoor golf tournament to be one of the celebs there. I got to meet a couple of guys. The Globetrotters, when I was a little boy, was something to watch. I got to meet Reggie Air Man Dixon. I got a picture with him. I was starstruck there, “Can I get a picture with you?” Now I’ve got a phone with a camera on it.

I met Lucille Ball when I was still hosting Steve Allen and I didn’t get a picture with her. She kissed me on the forehead and told me what a great singer she thought I was. I didn’t have enough sense to tell her, “Can I come audition for some of your shows that you’re doing at Desilu?” Let that be a lesson to you. Get a picture of whoever. If the janitor comes to pitch you a song, get a picture of him. He may turn out to be Kris Kristofferson.

I can’t think of a better place to wrap up than there, Bill. We could go on for days with these stories. I want to thank you. The name of our show is Leaving Nothing To Chance. It’s every Tuesday on Apple, Spotify and www.LeavingNothingToChance.com. The title of our book, one of which I wrote with Keith Hooper, is called Moving Up: 2020. It’s an Amazon best-seller. Also, Leave Nothing To Chance. All are available in Spanish and English. Bill, I want to thank you. This has been incredible. Continue your success. You’re blessing many people still. You’re going strong. I know you’re into physical fitness. I know your wife is waiting to take a walk with you. We better not hold Kim up too much longer.

I put your book in the mail, by the way, John. You’re going to get it.

Thank you so much.

I put a couple of music CDs in there as well. We have some music CDs that we still have. People don’t have CD players much in their cars anymore like they used to. Downloads are what we go with. You can go to our website, ChampionsKidsCamp.org and it’ll have information on us. Our personal website is BKNash.com, where you can see Reba McEntire doing one of our songs. You’ll see Dolly Parton and Wayne Newton and twenty other country stars. Larry Gatlin is doing a song we’re part of. Also, Diamond Rio’s video, In God We Still Trust, as well as our own video of it. You can check out all those things.

I appreciate anybody that would be interested in sponsoring a kid to camp. It’s $500 to sponsor a kid to our summer camp. We will be at Carolina Creek Christian Camp with probably a couple of hundred kids that have been through trauma and 50 volunteers. You can see what my life’s work is now. I give myself to Jesus Christ and to my Father God to help children that have been through trauma.

Bill, you’re doing some amazing stuff. Not only have you had an inspiring career, beautiful music and many artists but what you’re doing for these kids is special and unique. I know you’re doing God’s work. Continue with great health and success. Keith, I’ll turn it to you for a second for our closing thoughts.

A closing thought is to go to ChampionsKidsCamp.org. Maybe you don’t have $500 to support a kid yourself. You can send $20, $5 or whatever happens to be. You can make a difference. That’s why we’re in network marketing. That’s why John is doing these calls. John Solleder is doing Leaving Nothing To Chance because it makes a difference.

Bill Nash is doing what he’s doing and his lovely bride, Kim. That’s what they’re doing. They’ve made such a huge difference and so can you. That $5 could be the difference between one more kid coming to camp. Don’t limit yourself. If $5 is what you can do, get there. Get some of Bill’s music and his book. The title is true. Thank you, Bill Nash. I appreciate you very much.

Thank you for introducing me to John. I appreciate it. I look forward to us being friends, John. As long as Keith and I now have another twenty years, it wouldn’t hurt us at all.

I’m looking forward to it, Bill. We’re starting. Continue with good health. Thanks so much.

God bless you all and thanks for having me on. I’m honored.

This is Leaving Nothing To Chance. You can listen to us on Spotify, Apple, iTunes. You can always go to the archives of LeavingNothingToChance.com. These shows live forever.

Important Links:

• Championships Kids Camp
• Apple – Leaving Nothing To Chance
• Spotify – Leaving Nothing To Chance
• Moving Up: 2020
• Leave Nothing To Chance
• BKNash.com

About Bill Nash

In his autobiography, Bill takes you through the ups & downs of his music career, as well his own personal triumphs and failures. From a border town church in Texas, to major labels in LA, NY, & Nashville. From being hit by one heartbreak after another, & then finding faith, hope, & love, all over again, Bill Nash’s journey has been one unexpected turn after another. Two things have always guided him ever since he was a boy: God & music. He sang his way in, & sang his way out of every good & bad situation life has thrown at him. God has loved him at his best, & at his worst, & through it all, he kept on singing.