John Chisum is a veteran songwriter, recording artist, and coach, as well as founder and President of Nashville Christian Songwriters. He's also host of the popular podcast "Song Revolution with John Chisum."
John recalls dating an African-American classmate while they were both in grade school and the racism they both encountered.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Pull up a chair and tell me your memory. Why does it matter to you? I want to hear your story, your point of view. Tell me what happened to you.
(00:24):
Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened. Podcasts and features folks from all walks of life, from all over the world, each one telling us one childhood story, one true experience.
And then they tell us how that experience, that event, has impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehak, and like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences, some of them traumatic, some of them dramatic, some of them actually quite pleasurable.
(00:56):
But I always like to think that what's ever happened to me has made me a better person. Now I'm not saying that's actually true, but I'm telling you that's what I like to think.
Tell Me What Happened is sponsored by Side Line Ink Publishing, publishers of quality books, including Susan Seller's classics, I've Got Peace in My Fingers, and One Little Act of Kindness, both available on Amazon or wherever quality books are sold.
(01:21):
They're perfect for the holiday season for the little ones.
All right, today I have as my guest, John Chisholm. John is a veteran songwriter, recording artist and coach, as well as founder and president of Nashville Christian Songwriters.
He is also host of the popular podcast, Song Revolution with John Chisholm. Welcome to the show, John.
(01:48):
Hey, thanks, Jay. Good to be with you.
Hey, John, are you ready to tell your story?
I'm as ready as I'm going to get, buddy.
All right, listen. Well, I love it. I know you're a podcast, so you've got a fantastic sound of great voice. I'm going to get out of the way, John. I'm going to mute myself.
And when I'm done, I'm going to ask you, or when you're done, I'm going to ask you absolutely one question.
(02:10):
And that one question is, how do you think the story that you told us has impacted who you are today? So take it away, John Chisholm.
Thank you, Jay. Hello, everybody listening. Man, it's such a blessing to be here today. You know, this was tough for me.
I was very challenged, I guess, by picking one particular story out of my childhood.
(02:32):
I grew up in the turbulent 60s. And I remember in 1968, we were living in Birmingham, Alabama.
My dad was a newspaper reporter at the Birmingham Star. Dr. King had just been shot in Memphis.
It wasn't very much longer. My dad announced that we were moving to Memphis, Tennessee from Birmingham, Alabama.
(02:54):
And I was frightened to death. I just, I didn't know what that decision would mean, but I knew just enough. I was 10 years old.
I knew just enough about the violence. Now in our day, just everything with that with George Floyd and all of that, I felt like I was kind of reliving all of the racial tension and unrest.
(03:15):
But when I was 10 years old, my 10-year-old little brain thought that moving to Memphis, Tennessee was a death sentence.
It sounded like a frightening proposition and I could not understand why my otherwise sane daddy would be moving our little family from what felt like safe little Birmingham.
Of course, I was young. I was stupid. I was ignorant. I didn't know what any of that meant. And I didn't know about the Birmingham violence.
(03:42):
I didn't know all that was happening even then. But it just felt like we were driving off a cliff or headed into our death.
I don't know. I was just young and stupid and afraid. And so I went kicking and screaming. I didn't understand, of course.
Once we got there, settled in, it wasn't very much longer until there was massive desegregation happening.
(04:06):
Now, I wasn't bust at that time because I lived literally right across the street from the school that I was attending.
And so for whatever reason, that didn't apply to us. But I remembered that there was a moment when the black kids were being brought to our school that I started realizing, hey, they're just like me.
(04:27):
And I wound up dating a beautiful black girl named Pam Williams. And Pam, if you ever hear this, honey, I still remember you. You were sweet.
She was a sweet girl. I loved Pam and the other white kids in the school, man, they threatened me. Black kids threatened her.
It was really tense there for a moment. But I remember that moment that that racial barrier broke down for me.
(04:56):
My dad taught us very clearly to be very unbiased and to accept all people. And he was, of course, on the forefront of the civil rights movement as a reporter, as a journalist.
And so that upbringing and that experience for me really set the tone for my whole life.
(05:19):
And I think the one experience I'm trying to describe maybe happened over the period of a couple of years once we moved there.
But remembering the sense of losing my fear around race and black people, you know, in particular, and then actually dating Pam.
(05:40):
And that was kind of the memory that I settled on for you. I think it's so important in our day.
And I know that's your next question, but that was the memory that I just settled on.
I know a little bit about it, John, only in the sense that I tell you what happened to me.
Similarly, when I went to University of Illinois, I sort of fell in love with a young woman who was a beautiful African American woman.
(06:03):
But immediately I was told by a lot of people to back off. And in my cowardice, I backed off her particular friends, African American friends were like, don't even think about it, man.
I was like, hey, man, I'm just, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just a kid, young guy.
So I know that feeling. I hope Pam's doing okay out there.
(06:24):
I hope so, Pam. I love you, honey. I did. She was sweet.
She was sweet, but yeah, but to go from a frightened kid to one who saw the fallacy of bias and to, I don't know, it was just a very significant experience.
Yeah. Well, I can't imagine I'm from Chicago, I guess.
(06:47):
And that idea of living in Birmingham and then being afraid to move to Memphis.
It's such a young child thought as if, you know, that's so dramatically different.
Yeah.
So how do you think what happened to you as a child impacted who you are today?
I think it's really helped me in my life to feel very free for the most part of prejudice.
(07:10):
I know that there is still a lot of white privilege that I'm probably very ignorant of and probably still have things to repent of or things that, you know, when you're living in white privilege, it's kind of like not knowing how ignorant you are, you know, of what black people face, African-American people still face every single day, you know, in our world.
(07:37):
And it's made me, I think that I've been sensitized at least maybe more than some people because of that early childhood experience and have always been very accepting and loving of people of all kinds.
Because of my work and the music, the ministry that I've had for 40 years, I've actually traveled specifically to Nigeria five or six times and, man, I've got some beautiful, beautiful friends and family there.
(08:08):
And I'm just going to be really transparent.
It's difficult even to this day to be diverse in business and in life when all of your friends are white and most of your business associates are white.
And the Christian music industry that I've been a part of is predominantly white.
(08:29):
I mean, I would say I'd be feel pretty safe saying that and it's difficult even as a business owner to feel that your being as inclusive and diverse as you want to be because there is still so much bias and prejudice and white privilege.
But also, you know, I don't think that I'm very accepted sometimes by African American people that I meet or maybe Hispanic or Asian people.
(08:59):
That whole racial thing is just so deeply ingrained in our society and it's frightening kind of where we are in our society, the cultural wars.
And if I have a chance to help break any of that down and be a positive influence, that's really what I want to be.
So when I think back on that childhood experience, I feel like it's a setup to be some kind of agent of change now and to do whatever I can figure out to do to love and respect and honor people of all races.
(09:33):
And that goes for religiously as well.
I really think of myself as a more ecumenical kind of guy, even though my business is more in the evangelical Christian thing.
I want to think of myself as a broader kind of person, a broader thinker, more ecumenical, more loving of people who believe whatever they believe.
It doesn't matter, you know, to me.
(09:55):
So I think having a more open-minded stance on everything, just be more accepting and loving of all people, whether it's race or religion you're talking about or I think that experience.
Let me see if I can sum it up this way.
I think that was the beginnings of an open-mindedness, even dating Pam all the back all those years ago.
(10:19):
And like in your experience, that was not socially acceptable.
And it wasn't that I was just flipping off the world.
I was just open-minded enough, you know.
And so now I feel that I can have a discussion of warm, welcoming dialogue with anyone.
Faith, no faith, agnostic, on fire, Pentecostal, it doesn't matter.
(10:43):
Black, white, Asian, it just doesn't matter.
I just, I don't know.
I think that that experience was a good setup for being an open-minded person and I value that.
That makes me, whether it's totally in practice in every area of my life or not, you know, I still feel like that's my internal stance on that.
Yeah, do you give your father any credit for that or are you just thinking, I mean, because it sounds like he was a pretty reasonable man relative to all this.
(11:12):
I think journalism maybe just being a journalist helps you out.
I give him a hundred percent credit for it.
I think that, I mean, he grew up in the deep south, son of a sharecropper.
He was the only one out of his family who ever attained any higher education and went on.
His younger sister eventually did, but he was the first one that kind of left the poverty of the deep south and became something, I would say, more cosmopolitan, open-minded, broader kind of person.
(11:44):
Left the farm, if you will, and kind of made something of himself.
So he would have been steeped in bigotry, steeped in old-time religion, and steeped in all of the caricatures that you would think the stereotypes of the deep rural south.
So for him to grow up to be the kind of man he was and to instill that into his children, I give him a lot of credit, all the credit.
(12:12):
I'm glad you had that insight at a young age.
I'm sorry that you had to experience Pam Williams' breakup, but sounds like you came out okay in the end.
Absolutely.
We got to hope Pam's all right out there too.
I do think we live in a world where regardless of how hard we try, there are internal biases, et cetera, that are always at work.
(12:36):
And we got to keep working at it.
I think it's a lifetime.
It's a lifetime mission.
I'd like to think of myself as someone who's not racist or not sexist or agist, et cetera.
But I know in my heart I'm far from clean on all that.
I'm doing my best, but I have subtle biases.
I don't know.
(12:57):
I wanted to flip the script, man, and just actually call an intervention on you because it's apparent that you're not over some of that.
Maybe you're right.
Thank you so much.
Send me some of your Christian music and maybe I'll be moved by it.
(13:18):
I'll do that.
Well, John, thank you for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
It means a lot to me.
I think that there are a lot of listeners who can identify in the sense that there's some sort of a moment in one's life where you kind of have to make a decision where you stand and seriously not being able to date Pam can be, you know, turned in a different direction.
(13:43):
But sounds like you understood the difficulties of all that and were able to move past it.
And I wish you the best of luck with all your career.
Sounds like you're pretty dynamic and pretty successful. You don't need my wishes, but thank you sir.
I'll take every wish I can get.
No problem there.
All right.
Well, that's our show.
(14:05):
I'd like to thank my guest, John Chisholm for coming on and telling us that story.
So until next time, this is Jay Reak asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.
Pull up a chair and tell me your memory. Why does it matter to you? I want to hear your story, your point of view. Tell me what happened to you.
(00:24):
Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened. Podcasts and features folks from all walks of life, from all over the world, each one telling us one childhood story, one true experience.
And then they tell us how that experience, that event, has impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehak, and like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences, some of them traumatic, some of them dramatic, some of them actually quite pleasurable.
(00:56):
But I always like to think that what's ever happened to me has made me a better person. Now I'm not saying that's actually true, but I'm telling you that's what I like to think.
Tell Me What Happened is sponsored by Side Line Ink Publishing, publishers of quality books, including Susan Seller's classics, I've Got Peace in My Fingers, and One Little Act of Kindness, both available on Amazon or wherever quality books are sold.
(01:21):
They're perfect for the holiday season for the little ones.
All right, today I have as my guest, John Chisholm. John is a veteran songwriter, recording artist and coach, as well as founder and president of Nashville Christian Songwriters.
He is also host of the popular podcast, Song Revolution with John Chisholm. Welcome to the show, John.
(01:48):
Hey, thanks, Jay. Good to be with you.
Hey, John, are you ready to tell your story?
I'm as ready as I'm going to get, buddy.
All right, listen. Well, I love it. I know you're a podcast, so you've got a fantastic sound of great voice. I'm going to get out of the way, John. I'm going to mute myself.
And when I'm done, I'm going to ask you, or when you're done, I'm going to ask you absolutely one question.
(02:10):
And that one question is, how do you think the story that you told us has impacted who you are today? So take it away, John Chisholm.
Thank you, Jay. Hello, everybody listening. Man, it's such a blessing to be here today. You know, this was tough for me.
I was very challenged, I guess, by picking one particular story out of my childhood.
(02:32):
I grew up in the turbulent 60s. And I remember in 1968, we were living in Birmingham, Alabama.
My dad was a newspaper reporter at the Birmingham Star. Dr. King had just been shot in Memphis.
It wasn't very much longer. My dad announced that we were moving to Memphis, Tennessee from Birmingham, Alabama.
(02:54):
And I was frightened to death. I just, I didn't know what that decision would mean, but I knew just enough. I was 10 years old.
I knew just enough about the violence. Now in our day, just everything with that with George Floyd and all of that, I felt like I was kind of reliving all of the racial tension and unrest.
(03:15):
But when I was 10 years old, my 10-year-old little brain thought that moving to Memphis, Tennessee was a death sentence.
It sounded like a frightening proposition and I could not understand why my otherwise sane daddy would be moving our little family from what felt like safe little Birmingham.
Of course, I was young. I was stupid. I was ignorant. I didn't know what any of that meant. And I didn't know about the Birmingham violence.
(03:42):
I didn't know all that was happening even then. But it just felt like we were driving off a cliff or headed into our death.
I don't know. I was just young and stupid and afraid. And so I went kicking and screaming. I didn't understand, of course.
Once we got there, settled in, it wasn't very much longer until there was massive desegregation happening.
(04:06):
Now, I wasn't bust at that time because I lived literally right across the street from the school that I was attending.
And so for whatever reason, that didn't apply to us. But I remembered that there was a moment when the black kids were being brought to our school that I started realizing, hey, they're just like me.
(04:27):
And I wound up dating a beautiful black girl named Pam Williams. And Pam, if you ever hear this, honey, I still remember you. You were sweet.
She was a sweet girl. I loved Pam and the other white kids in the school, man, they threatened me. Black kids threatened her.
It was really tense there for a moment. But I remember that moment that that racial barrier broke down for me.
(04:56):
My dad taught us very clearly to be very unbiased and to accept all people. And he was, of course, on the forefront of the civil rights movement as a reporter, as a journalist.
And so that upbringing and that experience for me really set the tone for my whole life.
(05:19):
And I think the one experience I'm trying to describe maybe happened over the period of a couple of years once we moved there.
But remembering the sense of losing my fear around race and black people, you know, in particular, and then actually dating Pam.
(05:40):
And that was kind of the memory that I settled on for you. I think it's so important in our day.
And I know that's your next question, but that was the memory that I just settled on.
I know a little bit about it, John, only in the sense that I tell you what happened to me.
Similarly, when I went to University of Illinois, I sort of fell in love with a young woman who was a beautiful African American woman.
(06:03):
But immediately I was told by a lot of people to back off. And in my cowardice, I backed off her particular friends, African American friends were like, don't even think about it, man.
I was like, hey, man, I'm just, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just a kid, young guy.
So I know that feeling. I hope Pam's doing okay out there.
(06:24):
I hope so, Pam. I love you, honey. I did. She was sweet.
She was sweet, but yeah, but to go from a frightened kid to one who saw the fallacy of bias and to, I don't know, it was just a very significant experience.
Yeah. Well, I can't imagine I'm from Chicago, I guess.
(06:47):
And that idea of living in Birmingham and then being afraid to move to Memphis.
It's such a young child thought as if, you know, that's so dramatically different.
Yeah.
So how do you think what happened to you as a child impacted who you are today?
I think it's really helped me in my life to feel very free for the most part of prejudice.
(07:10):
I know that there is still a lot of white privilege that I'm probably very ignorant of and probably still have things to repent of or things that, you know, when you're living in white privilege, it's kind of like not knowing how ignorant you are, you know, of what black people face, African-American people still face every single day, you know, in our world.
(07:37):
And it's made me, I think that I've been sensitized at least maybe more than some people because of that early childhood experience and have always been very accepting and loving of people of all kinds.
Because of my work and the music, the ministry that I've had for 40 years, I've actually traveled specifically to Nigeria five or six times and, man, I've got some beautiful, beautiful friends and family there.
(08:08):
And I'm just going to be really transparent.
It's difficult even to this day to be diverse in business and in life when all of your friends are white and most of your business associates are white.
And the Christian music industry that I've been a part of is predominantly white.
(08:29):
I mean, I would say I'd be feel pretty safe saying that and it's difficult even as a business owner to feel that your being as inclusive and diverse as you want to be because there is still so much bias and prejudice and white privilege.
But also, you know, I don't think that I'm very accepted sometimes by African American people that I meet or maybe Hispanic or Asian people.
(08:59):
That whole racial thing is just so deeply ingrained in our society and it's frightening kind of where we are in our society, the cultural wars.
And if I have a chance to help break any of that down and be a positive influence, that's really what I want to be.
So when I think back on that childhood experience, I feel like it's a setup to be some kind of agent of change now and to do whatever I can figure out to do to love and respect and honor people of all races.
(09:33):
And that goes for religiously as well.
I really think of myself as a more ecumenical kind of guy, even though my business is more in the evangelical Christian thing.
I want to think of myself as a broader kind of person, a broader thinker, more ecumenical, more loving of people who believe whatever they believe.
It doesn't matter, you know, to me.
(09:55):
So I think having a more open-minded stance on everything, just be more accepting and loving of all people, whether it's race or religion you're talking about or I think that experience.
Let me see if I can sum it up this way.
I think that was the beginnings of an open-mindedness, even dating Pam all the back all those years ago.
(10:19):
And like in your experience, that was not socially acceptable.
And it wasn't that I was just flipping off the world.
I was just open-minded enough, you know.
And so now I feel that I can have a discussion of warm, welcoming dialogue with anyone.
Faith, no faith, agnostic, on fire, Pentecostal, it doesn't matter.
(10:43):
Black, white, Asian, it just doesn't matter.
I just, I don't know.
I think that that experience was a good setup for being an open-minded person and I value that.
That makes me, whether it's totally in practice in every area of my life or not, you know, I still feel like that's my internal stance on that.
Yeah, do you give your father any credit for that or are you just thinking, I mean, because it sounds like he was a pretty reasonable man relative to all this.
(11:12):
I think journalism maybe just being a journalist helps you out.
I give him a hundred percent credit for it.
I think that, I mean, he grew up in the deep south, son of a sharecropper.
He was the only one out of his family who ever attained any higher education and went on.
His younger sister eventually did, but he was the first one that kind of left the poverty of the deep south and became something, I would say, more cosmopolitan, open-minded, broader kind of person.
(11:44):
Left the farm, if you will, and kind of made something of himself.
So he would have been steeped in bigotry, steeped in old-time religion, and steeped in all of the caricatures that you would think the stereotypes of the deep rural south.
So for him to grow up to be the kind of man he was and to instill that into his children, I give him a lot of credit, all the credit.
(12:12):
I'm glad you had that insight at a young age.
I'm sorry that you had to experience Pam Williams' breakup, but sounds like you came out okay in the end.
Absolutely.
We got to hope Pam's all right out there too.
I do think we live in a world where regardless of how hard we try, there are internal biases, et cetera, that are always at work.
(12:36):
And we got to keep working at it.
I think it's a lifetime.
It's a lifetime mission.
I'd like to think of myself as someone who's not racist or not sexist or agist, et cetera.
But I know in my heart I'm far from clean on all that.
I'm doing my best, but I have subtle biases.
I don't know.
(12:57):
I wanted to flip the script, man, and just actually call an intervention on you because it's apparent that you're not over some of that.
Maybe you're right.
Thank you so much.
Send me some of your Christian music and maybe I'll be moved by it.
(13:18):
I'll do that.
Well, John, thank you for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
It means a lot to me.
I think that there are a lot of listeners who can identify in the sense that there's some sort of a moment in one's life where you kind of have to make a decision where you stand and seriously not being able to date Pam can be, you know, turned in a different direction.
(13:43):
But sounds like you understood the difficulties of all that and were able to move past it.
And I wish you the best of luck with all your career.
Sounds like you're pretty dynamic and pretty successful. You don't need my wishes, but thank you sir.
I'll take every wish I can get.
No problem there.
All right.
Well, that's our show.
(14:05):
I'd like to thank my guest, John Chisholm for coming on and telling us that story.
So until next time, this is Jay Reak asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.
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