 God in country says it all because our country needs God. We need to put God back into our lives and give Him honor and glory. Leonard Jemifortune toured and sang and performed with the legendary Statler Brothers for 21 years. He is the member of the Gospel Hall and the Country Music Hall of Fame and has entertained millions around the world. Today, God continues to take Him down new paths, surviving quintuple bypass surgery and sharing His new albums, God and Country and Brothers of the Heart. This is His story. This is today's Nashville. This is faith. Jamie, it is so good to see you again. Terry, it's good to be here with you again. It's been about, what, four years? It's been four years. You've been busy and what a year you've been through. This year's been a little tough year, but God's been good and faithful, taking me through a lot of things that I never dreamed I'd go through. But He's been faithful and brought me through it every step of the way. So I'm very thankful. Well, let's talk about that first because then I want to go back and where it all started. But let's talk about this year, what happened. Because I know I was following it and praying for you and your family. When I heard the news, I was just, ugh. Well, I had a couple of friends that had heart attacks and strokes. They were actually younger than me. And so all these alarms were going off inside of me. And my wife said one day, I told her about some little issues I was having. She said, we're going to make you a doctor's appointment. And I'm like, okay, if you want to, I don't think there's anything wrong. So I go into this doctor's appointment and I start telling him what's going on. I passed every test but won. And he said, we're going to do a heart catheterization on you. He said, I think you might need a stent or something like that. And I said, okay. So we lined it up. So I go in and do the catheterization. And he puts his screen up in front of me after it's all over with. It shows me my heart, which is have five blockages and one was 99%. The others were 95% blocked. And he said, I don't know how you're walking around. You hadn't had a massive heart attack yet. He said, we're going to do emergency surgery. We're going to take you right to the hospital, down to Centennial and do surgery, major surgery. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I never had major surgery in my life. And it was a whirlwind. And so we went in and had the surgery done and everything was fine. Came through the surgery. Great. And I was on my way to recovery. Then I got hit with Rocky Mountain spotted fever and pneumonia at the same time. And that was just about six weeks ago. So I'm kind of recovering from that right now. It kind of knocked me back about three months with my recovery. But believe me, you don't want Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It's not good. Well, what was going through your mind during this whole time, especially even when you heard the news, I'm going into surgery. They're going to stop your heart. I know what that's like because I used to do that. Yeah. It was, oh my gosh. Were you scared? At first I was scared. And then I got to the hospital. And Nina came in and she said, well, she just had put the announcement out that I had on Facebook that I had what I was going to have to go through. She told me, she said, Jimmy, you don't, you wouldn't believe how many people are praying for you right now all around the world. And when she said that, I just felt like I was floating on a cloud. They had no worries, nothing, nothing like that at all. So I had to have the surgery. I had this, went into the prep room and of course had some of my family with me. When they left, there were some of the doctors or not nurses there that were getting me ready for the surgery. Gave me the shot, which only takes a few minutes. A few seconds, basically you go out. But as soon as she gave me the shot, they walked out of the room and I heard this voice say, I've got you. And I was like, I looked around like, where did they come from? And I knew that it was God saying, I've got you. Don't worry. And I didn't. I was like, I said, if this comes out the other way, I've had a great life. I'm just thankful. And I did. I came through everything okay. And it was just, I don't know, I was so thankful that God spared me a heart attack that I didn't have that to go through. And I remember a few hours later, they got me up to walk after the surgery and I walked and I was just eager to get back and get going. And when I got home for the first time, I sat on my back porch and of course it was during a cold time of the year. But I sat on my back porch and when I sat there, the sun was shining right down on me and the beautiful white puffy clouds and a blue sky. And I just broke down and started just thanking God. Just thankful. Just thankful. And I've been that way ever since. Trying to come up with words to say thank you and I can't come up with the words. But I know he knows I'm very thankful that he brought me through it. And I felt like he still has things for me to do. The purpose of my life has been to lift God up, lift Jesus to say how important he is in our lives. We need him today. We've always needed him. But in today's world, we need people not to be ashamed to talk about Jesus and I'm not ashamed to talk about it because of the things that... If you could be me and not be thankful and say how important he is to us in our lives, there's something very, very wrong with you, I think. Let's go back to where it started and how you were raised when you knew Jesus, the statler brother. So let's just kind of go back a little bit. My family sang since I was a little kid, number seven of nine children were singing church and things like that. So it kind of led me to going out, eventually getting my first guitar, having a band, and then going out and playing clubs for a lot of years, about 10 years of my life doing cover music in all these places. Of course, I knew about God. I knew, I joined a church when I was nine years old and knew about Jesus. It was more of a head knowledge than it was. But my life started falling apart about 1993. I had some things in my life that I needed to deal with. My family, my daddy was dying of cancer and my family life was falling apart. How old were you then? Oh, let's see. About this time. It was 1993, so I was born in 55. So what would that be? So you were already married then? Oh, yeah, I was going to have a marriage. And I had seven children. And so all that was kind of falling apart. I was trying to put it back together, but I was on the road and I just didn't have time to be home to put things together. I wrote a song called Too Much on My Heart, which was brought on by that situation. So anyway, we were on the road with the Statue of Brothers. I was leaving to go on the road and all this stuff was happening. I didn't want to go. I just wanted to stay home. I was putting one foot in front of the other. I remember we stopped in Little Rock, Arkansas. This was around March 1993. I remember I was just so depressed and just down. So down. But it was about two in the morning. I'm walking to find my room. It's foggy. And then it's hotel room out in the middle of nowhere. But it was in Little Rock, Arkansas. I found my way to this room and I went in and I just felt like so down. I understood if I didn't know Christ and I had enough knowledge in my heart about being a Christian and what it meant to be from my mama and still in that in me. I know how people think about suicide and things like that. But to me it was such a selfish thing that I would never do that and I knew that in my heart. But other people do because they get certain things going on in their mind and it just takes over and sometimes I think they're not responsible for that but they do it anyway. So I'm not putting people down for doing that because I do understand that. But for me, I sit on the side of the bed, turn on my lamp and beside the bed and there was a Gideon Bible and it was opened up. And it was laying there and I'm like, why is that open? And so I just looked at it and I said, what does God have to say to me? And it said, it was Jeremiah 5 chapter 25, verse 25. It was said, your sins and your iniquities have kept good things from you. And I sat down on the side of the bed and I said, whoa. I felt like Jesus was sitting right next to me and I felt like I was crying. I was looking down and I felt like if I looked at him there, I would see him. I really did. I just felt that he was that real. And then I said, no, I'm not going to look at you because if I look, I'm doubting that you're there. I said, I know you're there. I don't have to look. And at that moment I said, Jesus, come into my heart. It starts with me. It doesn't start with anybody else. All these other things and all these other people in life that were doing things that I would say, oh, I got to do this because they're doing it or I got to do this because whatever. It was me. I had to clean up. And so I said, come into every room in my heart. Just don't come into the living room because there's things back there and there are bedrooms and everything else that I don't want you to see, but I want you to see it all. And he did see it all. I knew he could see it anyway. But go in there and clean him out for me, please. Just every little thing I'd give it to him. He said, look past the sin and look at me. And he would always have his arms out like this. Give it to me. So I did. And he began to clean my life up and change my life. I lost my father still. The things I prayed for I didn't want to lose. My family, my marriage, I didn't save that either. But he began to give me the things that I needed instead of the things I wanted. And you know, Jimmy, we're going to talk about it when we come back. Jimmy, what happened when Jesus started cleaning all those rooms? Well, I realized that just because you say you want Jesus to take over your life and come into your heart and clean out everything, that doesn't mean that things are going to go beautiful and that things are going to happen. And because life happens. But it gives you a peace inside of you that the peace that passes all understanding is the only way I know how to explain it. I didn't think I could ever deal with my father dying or my mother dying. I was just so close and just loved him so much that I thought I wanted to be as far away as possible. But God allowed me to be with him both times. And I felt the experience of death like that was a horrible thing in one moment but a most beautiful thing in the next moment because I felt their spirit leave their body and I felt them go to be with the Lord in that moment and the body was just laying there. The body was just a thing. And I'm like, I'm looking at it going, there's nothing there. And you wrote that song, I believe, for your... I believe was from that experience. Can you just think just a little... That is one of my favorite songs that you... It just touched me. Can you just sing a little bit of it? I'll sing the second verse and I don't have a guitar but I'll try to sing the second verse and maybe the chorus, I guess. But it says... Of 10,000 angels take her soul away To be crowned at Jesus' feet And I believe there's a place called... I believe in a place called Calvary That he gave and I believe for... Thank you so much. God gave me that song. I mean, it was a gift. Because I left Virginia. I'd been there 49 years and God asked me to leave and move to Nashville because I didn't want to. The physical part of me didn't want to. But the spiritual part of me knew I had to and I had moved everything out of the house in Virginia, my dream home up there. And I was standing on the deck saying goodbye and looked up and God gave me those words. He said, here's a gift. You honored me by doing what I asked you to do. So here's a gift for you. Thought about my mom. And that's been one of the biggest songs in my life. I know. It's one of my favorite songs of yours. Thank you. I appreciate that. So what was it like after that, leaving, coming back to Nashville? Well, it was hard at first because you're with one of the biggest groups of 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. I mean, it was... Well, tell me about the Statler Brothers. Well, the Statler Brothers hired me back in 1982 to come in and fill in for Ludewit, who was... There's been many God things in my life. This was one of them. But Ludewit suffered from Crohn's disease, who was a tenor singer for the Statler Brothers. He heard me singing at a ski resort in Virginia of all things. And when he was going to have to be out for about six months, he said, I heard this kid from the other side of the mountain near Charlottesville. He said, I think he could fill in for me if you give him a chance. I was the first name out of his mouth. So they called me up to come audition. I auditioned. And this is going to be in my book, which I'm writing now, hopefully, to the end of it. Long story. But they wanted to hire me for about six months to come in and fill in for Ludew. And Ludew decided that he couldn't come back after he was done his surgery and everything. So he asked me if I would do it full-time. It turned into a 21-year career, because I said, I'd be an idiot to turn this down. And sure enough, I had four new brothers in my life, and they took care of me for about 21 years. And I had a life that only comes from a fairy tale that how does that happen to someone who's a nobody? And just all of a sudden, you're thrown into this world of, you know, meeting all your heroes. Well, all of a sudden, you know, I'm like going from this small town where I hadn't been anywhere all my life. And a few weeks later, you're sitting in an oval office and talking to President Reagan. And you got all this stuff going on. You're in Hollywood. You're talking to all these movie stars and everything that you've only seen on TV that you go... It was an unreal world to me. And then all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of it, trying to figure it all out, but it's like a whirlwind. And I just... I would sit back and listen and watch. Because I didn't feel like I could say anything. You know, I felt like I'm not worthy to be here. You know, how did I wind up here? And so then I got these people talking to me like they know me, like all of a sudden. And it was just a weird... You became, you know, a superstar to a lot of people. Well, I mean, I had a hard time getting my heart around things like that. To me, I was just still all that, the simple person that came from Virginia, from nowhere. And the fact that somebody knows my name when I come to Nashville, I'm like, I can't believe it. And I'm still that way today. I'm in a world that I don't understand, but I grasp it and hold on to it and say thank God that he's allowed me a platform that when I do speak about God or Jesus, people listen. And because it's real, these experiences are real. And the simplicity of life, it can get complicated sometimes, but God has helped me negotiate it and deal with it. Like I said, when I gave my life to the Lord, didn't mean the bad things weren't going to happen in my life, but they may happen, but you can handle those things. Just like the heart surgery and different things that have happened. I've been able to handle it because of giving my life to him and saying he knows my purpose and he's going to help me attain the things that he wants me to attain for him, for his kingdom. You know, you're still very busy, still singing, still, and now you're writing a new book and the name of it is... Untold Fortune. Which is my life, it's Untold Fortune. And we're going to talk about it when we come back. Jimmy, tell me about your new book. It's called Untold Fortune and I've been in the process of writing this for about five years now. But every time I go to finish it up, something else happens in my life that kind of continues it on. But of all things, when I moved, I said I moved to Nashville about almost 20 years ago. I moved in next door to a guy named Dave Clark who is writing the story of my life now. He's a writer and he's written books. He's written also like 26 number one Christian songs and he's just... We only met like two years after I moved there at Monty Art and started talking and getting his relationship. Many God things in my life. This is one of them. I never thought that I would be a book written about my life. But when I started talking to him and telling him things about my life, I needed to write this. Because there are so many stories and so many facets of it that it doesn't just... He thought when we first started, maybe we'd started at the Stout Brothers and joined the Stout Brothers. But it goes back further than that. It goes on back to when my mom was born because I thought that was the most important part of the story. When my mom was born, she was two weeks old and my grandmother died. My granddaddy was having a hard time raising her and there was this lady who came from... My name is Ms. Grylls who moved from Nashville to come there to teach. This is in Virginia in a rural area that's way out in the boonies and it's like nobody ever goes there. Right? But on Ms. Grylls' way there and her husband, she was going there to teach. Someone told her about my granddaddy trying to raise those kids and my mom, what they call little bird is that she was just really tough. He couldn't keep up with her, right? So God spoke to her at that moment. She said, take me there. She'll want to talk to him. And God laid it on her heart to help him raise my mom and to hurt my uncle and my aunt. And so she went there and her husband not too long after that passed away and when he passed away, my grandfather moved out of the house and moved into the smoke house where he had his bed set up and let her have the room in the house. And so he raised my mom until she was 18 years old. She taught her the Bible, taught her how important praying was. She taught her until my mom accepted the Lord as a little child and mom was a prayer warrior. And because of Ms. Grylls, I thought that's where the story began. It wasn't with me, with my life and music and all that stuff. Her life and what she did to make that sacrifice has influenced my family all along the way still today. The prayers that my mom prayed and that Ms. Grylls taught her about the Bible and the things, they're what's still happening today. And so prayer lives on. I don't care if you prayed that prayer 10 years ago, God heard it and in his time he's going to answer that prayer if you really mean it from the bottom of your heart. And so I believe that. I still feel my mom's prayers being answered right today because of Ms. Grylls, but the book is full of stories like that. Tell me about your new projects. You did God and Country and Brothers of the Heart. Brothers of the Heart, God and Country. God and Country is just one of a dove award for it not too long ago, for Album of the Year, Country Bluegrass Roots Album, I think it was. And it was about celebrating our God and celebrating our country and how important it is to have those two in God we trust where four words of this country was built on and I always felt it was very important. And that's a passion of yours, isn't it? That's a passion. It was my purpose to not separate. People want to separate. If we separate God from our country, we're going to be in trouble. Do you see it happening now? I see it happening today. It's funny because it's not funny really. It's sad, some of the things we see. But I also see the good side. I always see good people that love God, that are passionate about it. But sad, again, that you see things happening that you feel like you can't do anything about. It's in God's hands. It always has been. And there are things that you have to put in his hands and say, God help us with this, take care of this. And then there are times you have to take a stand about things. But I see where that's very important. And so I think that's why that CD did so well. It's a DVD as well. Gayther Music, that Gayther has been so good to us about putting us out there and putting our purpose out there through our music. And the Brothers of the Heart thing that you're talking about is teamed up with Ben Isaacs, Mike Rogers, and Bradley Walker. It's also a CD and a DVD that you can get in Cracker Barrel and especially you can get the CD in Cracker Barrel. You have to order the DVD from Gayther Music and order it off TV or you can get it from our website, all of our websites. Mine's at jimmyfortune.com. You can get on there and find out anything you want to find out about it. But it's been a God thing again. It's where I get to team up with my guys and brothers again from the Staddle Brothers to my new brothers with Ben and Mike and Bradley. It's all kinds of music. It's gospel, it's country, it's kind of pop. It's a little bit of everything that we go up and go out and take some of our favorite songs that shaped our lives and we redo them and we pay tribute to the song but also do it in our way, do it in our style. And it's been very, very effective, sold a lot. And you're on the road a lot now, aren't you? I've been on the road. I was out working six weeks after my heart surgery. I was out working full time pretty much. It has told the tale on me a little bit. I need to, especially when some of the things happened when my immune system got down a little bit and I struggled some. But the fans really understood. There were times I was standing on stage and I would lose my breath and I'd say, hey, I got to go off for a minute and come back. Well, you're so loved by so many. And the fans were saying, I came back out and they said, you can just stand there, jimmy, we don't care. Just stand there. And I was like, no, I'm never going to do that. I said, I'm going to try to give you your money's worth anyway. And so I've tried to do that. And God's been good and faithful, helped me through a lot of things along the way. What would you like to share with those who are listening to you about your faith? I would like to share that, you know, God is faithful. And I always say the problems in your life that you can't deal with, if you are serious about what you have going on in your life, confront it, say what it is, and give it to Jesus. Because like I said, when he was dealing with me, he said picture me with my arms out and whatever it is you're dealing with in your life, look past it, give it to me. And that was a picture that I had and I would say, whatever I'm dealing with here, I'm just going to give it to you. And it changed my life. And he's still using you? He's still big time. So don't ask him to do something if you really don't want it, because he's going to do it. And that's a promise. Jimmy, thank you so much. You're welcome. Continue to bless so many people. Thank you for being with me today. I'm honored. Thank you, Terry. My friend, it only takes one person to change another person's life. Like Jimmy said, you never know what that next person is going to do and how many people it'll reach for Jesus. Do it today. Be that one person. This is today's Nashville. This is faith.