been taking care of. It’s been a really, really busy summer, but it’s been a good thing, you know?
When did you get these foster children Billy? How long ago? Well, one of them, I got the - “the Monkey” as we call him - actually, the story is we got him the night of Tommy’s memorial service. (Ed. Note: Tommy Crain, Billy’s brother who passed in 2011) Remember there was a memorial service in Nashville? Ad they called at 2:30 in the morning and wanted to bring him, and I was laying in bed and I remember my wife was talking to the Department of Children’s Services, and I’m over there saying ”Please say no, please say no, please say no.” And she said yes, and I went “Awwww,” but you know what? It was like the spirit of Tommy came in. This little boy has been the joy of our life and it helped me heal from Tommy’s death. It’s just been a joy. And the little girl came, we’ve had her for almost seven months - she was four days old when we got her.- and was born addicted to heroin.
Oh no!
Oh yeah, it was hard watching her and help- ing her get through that. Both of them are the light of our lives - they’ve just been an amazing gift. I highly recommend that peo- ple foster children if they can. There’s so many out there who need good parents, good people to take care of them. You would know, a lot of folks wouldn’t believe how many there are that are out there that need somebody. But there are. It’s sad because their parents made unwise choices and it’s not exactly that they’re bad people, bad par- ents, per se. They just made wrong choices and, unfortunately, it’s the children that pay when that happens, and they need people to take care of them and get through it.
Hopefully, we’re going to be adopting both of these children.
Oh wow! That’d be neat.
Yeah, I figure the little boy will be introduc- ing me when he’s in high school as Grandpa, I’ll be so old, you know. (Laughs)
Grandpa Billy (laughs) That’d be alright though, nothing wrong with that. Alright. Your new album is called Creole Shoes so first thing I want to know is why is it called “Creole Shoes”?
When I went to Haiti last year, 2011, actually I was supposed to go to Haiti the day of Tommy’s memorial and it got pushed back a month because they had elections in Haiti. There were riots and stuff, so it turned out to be a blessing for me, because I couldn’t have gone at the time. The language down there is called Creole, you know, it’s a French kind of speaking language. I did a lot of walking and ministering in this one pair of tennis shoes the whole time down there and I was already working on a new record, trying to think of a title, and I was looking at my shoes and said, yeah God, “Creole Shoes,” and said ‘wow, what a good title.’ That’s where that came from.
Is that kind of what the song deals with, too? Yeah, it is. Basically, I went up one day with the pastor of the Baptist church we were working with down there. We went up with him and Eddie Mosely, my mentor and a leader from my church, we went up this mountain about four miles straight up and we would stop at different people’s houses and see how they were doing and pray over ‘em and read a little bit of scripture, and it
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