Jimmy Wayne, country musician and now author, visits Charlotte

The idea for the book started on the walk, Jimmy Wayne says.

The walk ... the 1,700-mile Forrest Gump-like hike that Wayne took in 2010 from Nashville, Tenn., to Phoenix, in an effort to call attention to homeless youth and children aging out of the foster care system.

By that time, Wayne was an established country music star, with three Top 10 hits and two successful albums – a whole life away from the days when he was a homeless youth in Kings Mountain. But for seven months, Wayne’s life was devoted to the “Meet Me Halfway” walk.

“And that’s when I started thinking about the book,” recalled Wayne, who will perform Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway as part of a pre-race concert that also includes The Band Perry.

“Walk to Beautiful: The Power of Love and a Homeless Kid Who Found the Way” is Wayne’s life story. It was released Tuesday.

Wayne, 42, is best known for such hits as 2008’s No. 1 “Do You Believe Me Now” and 2003’s “Stay Gone.” But he had another life. Wayne said his father abandoned the family shortly after he was born, and his mother served time in prison.

Jimmy Wayne (who dropped his last name, Barber, when he got to Nashville) and his sister, Patricia, spent time in foster homes in Cleveland and Gaston counties. Wayne ran away from home as a young teen. But his life changed in 1990 when he met Russell and Bea Costner, a Bessemer City couple who were in their 70s at the time.

Wayne had been hired to mow their lawn, but the Costners took him in.

“They gave me a home,” Wayne said. “Russell died three months after I moved in, but Bea Costner raised me.”

He graduated from Bessemer City High School and got a job at the state prison in Gaston County. He went to Nashville in the mid 1990s in hopes of making it big. Bea Costner died in 1997 but got to see Wayne making a success of himself in music.

“Taking the walk (to Phoenix) was important, but writing the book was more important,” Wayne said. “There were a lot of things I needed to say.”

He got help from New York Times best-selling author Ken Abraham, who also co-wrote biographies of celebrities such as Chuck Norris and George Foreman. Wayne said he wrote down everything he could remember about his childhood – wearing the old clothes, shuffling from foster home to foster home, running into trouble with the law as a teen.

“I handed Ken Abraham about 700 pages of notes,” Wayne said.

A person without family ties, Wayne kept records of everything in his life. The records are his ties to the past.

A decade ago, Wayne said, he didn’t talk much about his past to concert crowds. “They tell you not to do that,” he said of music executives. “But I didn’t feel like I was connecting to the audiences.”

So he started talking about his past, and Wayne said he believes he is helping others.

“All the time, I have people coming up to me, telling me they had a similar background,” he said. “They thank me for what I’m doing.”

The book is not easy reading. Wayne’s early years were not happy.

Some of that is obvious in his songs, like 2004’s “Paper Angels,” recounting the years when he and his sister received Christmas gifts courtesy of the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program. But he said he feels like he is moving ahead now.

“I didn’t do this for the attention,” he said. “I’ve had enough of that. I wrote this in hopes of inspiring people to get involved in a kid’s life.

“Most of them are not bad kids. They just need someone to get involved with them, like my life.”

This story was originally published October 8, 2014 at 3:33 PM with the headline "Jimmy Wayne, country musician and now author, visits Charlotte."