This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

  She had seen me before, I would find out later. At the Bluebird Cafe about two years earlier. I was playing a songwriters’ show, and she was in the audience, sitting within a few feet of me. I didn’t see her or meet her, at least, not that I can remember, but she remembers it perfectly. She said as she listened to me sing the songs I had written and tell my stories, she had this feeling come over her that I was the one. That we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. She told me that too. It wouldn’t be for another two years, but that was one of the first things she told me when we finally got the chance to meet and talk.

  But that night at the Bluebird, she didn’t say anything. Something inside her just knew. The way the Canadian geese that fly over our farmhouse know when it’s time to make their way south or head north for home at winter’s end. No one can explain how they know . . . they just know.

  As that night at the Bluebird wore on, I introduced my daughters, Heidi and Hopie, to the audience. Joey said she thought to herself, Aw, he’s married. What a shame. All the good ones are already taken. Then she went on with her life, working at a horse vet clinic and trying to find her way in music.

  That was in 2000, and she had moved to Nashville two years earlier, from her hometown of Alexandria, Indiana. Known as the hometown of gospel legend Bill Gaither, it was an hour northeast of Indianapolis and a million miles from Music City, where Joey had dreamed of moving since she was a little girl. Dolly Parton was her hero. She had learned “Coat of Many Colors” when she was three or four years old. Before she could read, she had taken a cassette tape upstairs in the farmhouse where she grew up and did not come back down until she knew the whole song by heart.

  Alexandria (locals call it Alex . . . spoken like “Elek”) was a wonderful little community, and the seventies and eighties were a wonderful time to grow up there. Her father, Jack Martin, played guitar and worked for General Motors, and her mother, June, was a stay-at-home mother who had the voice of a honky-tonk angel. They had met in high school and had played in a band together. Both having dreams of doing something more with their music, before diapers and paychecks became the goal and five little mouths the priority. Joey had two older sisters, Jody and Julie; a younger brother, Justin; and a baby sister, Jessie. Joey spent her days playing in the corncrib and barns and riding her bike to neighbors’ houses until she was old enough to buy her first horse. From then on she rode Velvet everywhere she went. She said, for three or four years in a row, she went as the Headless Horseman for Halloween and trick-or-treated from a saddle.

  Those were great memories for her. As were her times of singing with her parents. They played local fairs and VFWs, and any other place that would let her sing, while her daddy played his twelve-string Guild guitar. Music was always her gift. Her voice was special, everyone said back then. They say the same thing now, nearly a lifetime later.

  When Joey graduated high school in 1994, she was still singing and set her sights on Nashville. She knew that was where she wanted and needed to be, but she didn’t know how she was going to get there. She worked for a horse vet for the next two years, then transferred to a vet in Tennessee. That was how she got here. Joey was always practical. Even her dreaming was practical.

  Once in Nashville, she took a unique approach to becoming famous. She worked with horses. That was her plan. She would do what she knew how to do and hope that it would lead somewhere. And it did. Through the horse world, she would meet Kix Brooks’s wife and then Kix (of Brooks & Dunn). And LeAnn Rimes’s father, Wilbur. They all saw something in her—first in her character and then her talent—and wanted to help. In time, she found herself with a record deal on Sony Records and with Paul Worley, of Dixie Chicks fame, producing an album with her. That’s where I showed up, again.

  Joey was still working for a horse vet clinic in Thompson’s Station, south of Nashville, and one day Bob McCullough, one of the doctors at the clinic, told her he was going out to see his neighbor Tim Johnson. Tim was a songwriter performing that night, along with another guy named Rory Lee. Joey said she got a big smile on her face when she heard my name and told Dr. Bob about the time she’d seen me play at the Bluebird a few years earlier. She told him that if I hadn’t been married with kids, she would’ve thought we were meant to be together. Then Bob explained to her that I wasn’t married and that I’d been a single father for the last twelve years.

  Joey said she hightailed it home and got ready, then made a beeline to Mount Pleasant to see if the feelings she had before were still there.

  I was already at Pearl’s Palace, getting the tables and sound ready for the night’s show when Joey came walking in. It was a weekly songwriter show that I was putting together in this new venue, and I wanted everything to be just right. I was walking toward the stairs when I saw these long legs come bounding up the steps and this gorgeous raven-haired woman land right in front of me.

  The evening is looking up, I thought. “Hello,” I said. She sorta smiled and said hi back.

  “I’m Rory,” I told her.

  “Joey,” she said. “My name’s Joey.”

  And my world changed forever.

  I didn’t know it at the time. You never know these things when they’re happening. They seem like normal, everyday occurrences—like nothing special is happening, but it is. The world is shifting and up is about to be down and right is about to be left, and the life you knew before isn’t ever going to be the same.

  I guess we stood there and chatted for a minute. Me asking her what had brought her there and her saying she was meeting friends to watch the show. I was friendly to her, but she was very standoffish to me. I remember seeing her from my stool on the stage. I can still picture the table where she was sitting with her friends. I wondered how such a beautiful girl had walked into a place like this. So far from Nashville, where all the beautiful women seem to congregate.

  But then the next week she showed up again. And she was again sitting at a table watching me and three other songwriters perform. I thought, That’s strange. Because this time the only songwriter onstage she knew was me. Was she coming back just to see me?

  After the show a bunch of us walked down the block to my office. I had turned the old hardware store on the square in Mount Pleasant into a songwriting studio about six months earlier. Inside, I had a couple of couches, a piano, and an old soda machine where I kept small Coke bottles. Somehow Joey followed our group there and sat with us. I tried to talk with her, but she really didn’t say much. She was still standoffish. I remember thinking it was clear that she wasn’t interested in me. I had learned by then that she had a record deal and was looking for songs to record, so I asked her if I could play a few of my songs for her. If nothing else, maybe she would record one. She wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “You can mail them to my P.O. box,” she said as she walked out. I knew then for sure where I stood with her. Nowhere.

  A week or so went by, and I realized that along with her address, she had also written a phone number on the piece of paper. So I called it and got a machine. I left a message. A few days went by, and I didn’t get a call back. God had been working on me, and I could read the signs. They all said, “This girl doesn’t like you.” But later that week, something made me call her one last time. I left her a voice mail that said I was calling her one last time and I added, “If you want to call me back, here is my home number.” I figured that was the end of that. But, around nine that evening, the phone rang.

  I had just put the girls to bed and was sitting on the couch in the living room when she called. I recognized the number on the caller ID, so I picked up the phone and casually said, “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end said, “This is Joey. I want to tell you why I’ve been cold and distant to you.” Then as I listened, with my jaw hanging open, she told me about seeing me at the Bluebird a couple years before and feeling inside that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together and how she saw my kids and thought I was marrie
d. She told me about the doctor telling her I wasn’t married and that she’d come to the show in Mount Pleasant that first night to see if the feelings she originally had for me were still there. “They were,” she said. So she came back the next week too. She told me how nervous she had been to talk to me because it was as if God was saying, “Him . . . that is who you’re going to marry.”

  I thought, This must be a hoax. Maybe my friend Tim Johnson has gone to elaborate lengths to pull one over on his buddy. I’d never heard of such a thing—especially coming from such a beautiful girl. I thought, If this is real, I might have just won the lottery!

  But then she told me she was dating a wonderful guy, up in Indiana, and that they’d been together for a year and a half and she was probably going to marry him. But she wanted to tell me that if things were different, if the timing were better, maybe she and I would be together.

  I was dumbfounded. It was too much to believe, but I played along.

  “So I was your destiny, but now somebody else is?” She said yes, that was how it seemed. I thought, This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. But I also thought it was pretty awesome in a weird sort of way. Then I half-jokingly asked her, “Can we meet for coffee sometime . . . so I can see who it is that I missed out on marrying?”

  Surprisingly, she said yes, and we made a date to meet for coffee the next Saturday morning at the truck stop by my exit.

  Twenty-Nine

  A GIRL, A DOG, AND A TRUCK

  Something inside told me, This is it. This is her. This is what God has been preparing you for.

  When I walked into Stan’s Truck Stop, Joey was already there. Stan’s is like a Cracker Barrel—before there were Cracker Barrels all over the South—filled with aisles of knickknacks in the main room and a restaurant in the back. She was standing in an aisle, looking at something or other, when I said hello. She turned around and said hello back. I just stood there, staring at her. Looking her up and down. I’m sure she thought I was a weirdo. But this girl didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. Her long dark hair fell down on her faded Carhartt barn coat, with sleeves frayed from hundreds of hours of working in the cold and stains on the sleeves from “horse placenta,” as she would tell me a little while later, during our conversation over coffee.

  We sat at a table near the window and talked a long, long time. Her telling me about her life and me telling her about mine. Something in her eyes made me feel like I could be honest. Like I could tell her the truth about who I was and who I was trying to be. About my girls and about growing up the way I did. I’m pretty sure, at some point, I cried, and she reached out her hand, her fingers wrapped around mine. I looked up to find the softest, kindest brown eyes I’d ever seen, looking not just into my eyes but into my soul. And it was over.

  I felt a voice inside of me saying, This is the one I have chosen for you, but I couldn’t believe it. It was too real, too good. Too much like magic. I’d written plenty of songs about magic and about people falling in love with just a look or a touch, but that stuff wasn’t real. It was just make-believe. It was the stuff in movies. A Sleepless in Seattle story, made up by brilliant writers who know how to manipulate heartstrings with the right words and the right music playing at the right time. But there was no music—only the sounds of pans clanging in the kitchen and men with Farm Co-op caps in booths talking about rain coming in and the timing of the hay that needed cutting.

  But I didn’t hear any of it. Or see it. All I could see was Joey, and all I could feel was that moment.

  Joey had brought some homemade bread with her to the restaurant. She had baked it the night before. As she unwrapped it and cut me a slice, she told me about her life and her dreams. How her mom had helped her load all her stuff into a cattle trailer and she’d made the trip to Nashville without really knowing anyone. How she had dated a cowboy for a few years and it hadn’t worked out. About her sisters and how they were having babies and she didn’t have that desire inside of her. That maybe music was her baby. How she loved to sing in the choir at the church she attended. And how she cried at baptisms.

  Then she told me about her record deal, how they were almost done with the album and how excited she was about it. How she worked at a vet clinic and loved making the rounds to different farms with the doctors. She only took time off to sing in the studio and then came right back to work.

  An hour turned into three, and soon the banana nut bread she’d made was all gone. I walked her to her car—a black Dodge truck that was parked around back. Her dog, Rufus, was in the bed, sleeping in the shade she had parked under. Joey introduced me, and I watched her rub his ears and him melt into her touch. It was easy to see this was her best friend. And she was his. I gave her a hug good-bye, and she drove off.

  As I made my way back under the interstate toward my farmhouse, I called my sister Candy on my cell phone. “I just had coffee with someone,” I told her. “You don’t know her, and neither do I, really. She’s in the music business, and I don’t want to be with someone in the industry. I have kids, and she doesn’t want children. And she’s in a serious relationship with a doctor in Indiana.” Candy listened on. “Anyway . . . we’re headed in opposite directions, but I have this weird feeling that I was just looking into the eyes of my destiny. I felt I needed to call and tell someone.”

  My sister had never heard me talk that way about someone and knew it was a big deal for me to say that. I didn’t know what had just happened, but I knew enough to know that it felt different from anything else I’d ever experienced. I told her I wanted to tell her about it so we could pay attention and see if anything came of it.

  Nothing probably would. But then again, you never know.

  Thirty

  NOTHING TO REMEMBER

  I’m thankful for the day we met

  that evening in September

  ’cause I’d rather have something to forget

  than nothing to remember.

  Our truck-stop date was in the fall of 2001. Weeks went by, and Joey and I would talk on the phone now and then. Mostly, I would call and check in with her to see how she was doing. More than once she told me that she would be going back to Indiana that coming weekend to see the guy she was dating, and she thought that maybe he was going to propose to her or, at least, ask her dad for permission to marry her. I would sorta laugh and say once again, “So let me get this right. . . . I was your destiny, but now this guy is? And you’re gonna marry him?” She would say yes, very matter-of-factly. Then I would talk with her the next week and find out that he had been busy in his work and hadn’t gotten around to talking to her dad or asking her. I found that very interesting.

  At the time, I was writing songs for a publishing company on Music Row, so I invited Joey to come with me and my girls to a CMA Viewing Party that was going to be happening in a few days. They had a big catered event every year in a large tent behind their building to watch the Country Music Awards. She agreed to go with us. That was our first date. Sort of.

  I was actually dating another girl at the time. She was young and fun, and the kids loved her, and, of course, Joey was dating the doctor in Indianapolis. So we couldn’t technically go on a date. But we spent the evening together listening to and watching the music we both loved so much on a big screen, and I got to see Joey around my girls and just be with her. It was easy to see that she was special.

  A few days later we got together to write a song. I proposed that we write about a couple who wasn’t able to be together long-term but was thankful for the little bit of time they had with each other. She thought that idea maybe hit a little too close to home. I told her that was the point . . . let’s write what we couldn’t say. The result was the first song we ever wrote together called “Nothing to Remember.”

  Like Joey, the song was special, and I knew it. It’s still special. I have the original recording we did of it. She and I sat on the carpet in her little apartment in Franklin, Tennessee. Me on guitar, Joey singing. By the t
ime we did the full demo, we had changed the words of the first verse. She was afraid that someone might see through the lyrics and realize that this song was more than just a made-up story. That there was some truth in it. The original lyrics had talked about how she had come to a place with another guy and heard me sing and that’s how we met . . . but we made it that she randomly ran into me in a store. It was safer that way.

  The afternoon that I was in the recording studio mixing the song, Joey’s boyfriend happened to be in town visiting her. She brought him to the studio to hear the mix. It’s the only time I ever met him. He was wonderful. I could see why she liked him. It was a little surreal, listening back to the song with her and him sitting on the couch beside me . . . listening to the new lyrics we’d written to hide the words and emotion we both felt. It felt wrong but not really. Joey would never do anything that wasn’t honoring to him or to God. Or even to me. It was who she was. I wasn’t quite there yet, but I was getting closer.

  Joey was the person who would help me fully realize the potential of my character and walk with God. I didn’t know it yet, but in a few months’ time, she would be the rock by my side that would change everything.

  Especially me.

  Thirty-One

  SIGN LANGUAGE

  I asked for God to give me a sign. . . . He gave me a building-sized billboard.

  Joey and I kept in touch and would talk to and see each other now and then, but it was clear that she was headed in one direction and I was headed in the other. And just as she had told me: if the timing had been different, things might’ve worked out for us.