Nelly reflects on one of the most rewarding moments of his life, the time he was able to retire his mother.
The rapper opened up about witnessing his mother work numerous jobs in the fast food industry and how she helped him get his first job at the age of 14 at a food truck. During that same time, his mother, Rhonda Mack, worked as a manager at McDonald’s in Clayton, MO.
“She said, ‘Yo, I can’t give you a real job, but on the weekends they got a truck… She said, ‘I can give you a job there.’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ll take it.’ And the owner would pay me $25… I wound up getting about $140 by the time homecoming came,” the rapper recalled.
Before being introduced to the music industry, Nelly began working the grill at McDonald’s which would come to an end for him to focus on his music career. In 1999, Nelly burst onto the music scene with his hit “Country Grammar” followed by his breakthrough album with the same name.
After the success of his first album, the first person he shared the news with was his mother. He recalled the moment when he drove into the drive-thru of her job during her shift and told her that she can quit her job.
“I didn’t tell her I was coming, and I just drove through the drive-thru, and I pulled up to the window, and she was like, ‘Hey.’ She didn’t know I was coming. And I was like, ‘You should come with me. You can quit.’ And that was basically the best memory that I had, was being able to pull up to her job and tell her she doesn’t have to work there anymore,” he said.
Nelly added, “My mom had worked in fast food for over 30 years, and it was kind of rough if you ever worked in fast food, which I worked at McDonald’s all through high school and things like that, so I knew it could be very taxing, but she did it for over 30 years. Sometimes, she worked two jobs at once, and that was very rewarding for myself to be able to do that for her.”