NEW YORK, December 19, 2011 — If you choose one book this Christmas, make it Jimmy Wayne’s Paper Angels. This is a rare holiday book, heartwarming and delivered without a hint of cynicism.
The story is about how a middle-age man in turmoil and a teenage boy with a family crisis are brought together through a paper angel hung on a Salvation Army tree. Each angel on the trees represents a child in need.
Jimmy Wayne, whose songs like Do You Believe Me Now, Stay Gone and I Love You This Much have gone to the top of the Billboard Charts, was a homeless teen, and he was once a paper angel himself.
Jimmy Wayne/Image Dean Kirkland
His hit song Paper Angels about The Salvation Army Angel Tree program inspired him to write a novel Paper Angels with co-author Travis Thrasher.
“I wanted to continue the awareness,” he notes.
Wayne knows firsthand the serious impact that lack of stability and family can have on kids. He founded his Meet Me Halfway in 2010 to raise awareness about foster care youth who are driven to poverty and homelessness when they “age out” of the foster care system.
“I was performing a charity event in my hometown back in North Carolina in March 2006 and during the song Paper Angels I asked the audience to participate. They sang softly and one by one they began holding these paper angels in the air,” he explains. “After the show, a girl handed me one of these handmade paper angels and said, ‘It took me a long time to make these. I hope you like them.’ I taped that paper angel to the back of my guitar, where it has remained to this day.”
Jimmy Wayne performing Paper Angels:
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