Doug Mathis

We are hosting an event called An Acoustic Evening for Autism. And we've got Daryl Worley, T. Graham Brown, John Barry. Dylan Massengale, Jamie O'Neal, her sister Minnie Murphy who has an autistic child. I'll be performing and Farron Hamblin will be performing with his autistic nephew. So it's going to be great.

I wrote a song a couple years ago about a little autistic boy. His name is Jack. He's seven years old. He's all about numbers because of his autism.

So he's always asking Mom how many days till Christmas, how many days till my birthday, how many days till Grandma comes, you know. And he was actually about to take his first communion. They're Catholic.

And so he's learning about heaven at church, learning about Jesus. And they're putting the toys away one night, throwing them off the bed. And he looks at his mom in a very matter-of-fact way and says, Mom, how many days till I go to heaven?

So that evening, instead of tucking him in, she climbed in with him and began to try to explain to a seven-year-old autistic little boy matters of faith and trust. She posted about it on Facebook. It hit me real deep. Yeah. I wrote this song. It didn't take me long. I probably wrote it in less than an hour. Wow. And the song took off.

It was, it was a number one song on the positive country charts and people were listening to it all over town. And so here in Nashville, that's kind of a big deal. Yes. So, uh, we wanted to do more for the community and someone said, well, why don't you hold an event for autism? And I said, it's exactly what I need to do. And so it kind of blossomed from there.

We got some help from some other people in the industry. Right. And now we're hosting this event and we had, we raised over $6,500 last year with about eight artists. And this tonight we'll have eight. Nice. And we hope to raise a lot more.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

We work on it for months. Yeah. It takes months to put it together. And the real challenge is now we have formed the Country Music Autism Awareness Foundation. Okay. And we want to do more of these.

We'd like to do, you know, we'd like to do several of these a year and I'd like to take them on the road and do one in Texas and do one in California and do one in Alabama and and just move it around, depending upon the artists that we can get and what kind of participation we can get. But we really want to encourage these families and try to be a blessing to them.

well we didn't even know what autism was yeah yeah and so you know growing up right I had some friends and they were a little different but I didn't think anything about it right right and then I pastored churches for over 20 years okay and I had an autistic boy in my church yeah didn't know that's what it was right but it was clearly what it was sure and so after I wrote this song I started finding about how many people

All right.

Tony, it's a lot of work.