by Rory Feek
I have also tried to be more proficient at other instruments, with the hope that while I may have been given “okay” guitar prowess, I could possibly be a prodigy on something else. Maybe I just hadn’t discovered it.
And so for one birthday, Joey gave me an upright bass. I thought that for sure I’d be a genius on it in time. Heck, it only had four strings and you only had to hit one at a time. How hard could that be? Turns out that the greats on bass—studio players like Kevin Grantt—have spent a lifetime working on developing their gift. It wasn’t an overnight thing.
And so, though I could play along with some songs and was fairly good at it, I put it down and picked my guitar back up.
A year or so later Joey got me a mandolin. This one should be super easy. It’s teeny weeny. Anyone could learn to master this, I thought. Maybe my fingers were too big, probably just my expectations. But either way I wasn’t very good. I gave that mandolin to our fiddle player. I knew he would play it, and he does. I see it on TV, in shows he’s playing from time to time.
I’ve gone on to have visions of grandeur about playing banjo (there’s one sitting right here by my desk), piano, and a few other things on my list of things I can’t play. But the intention is always there. The hope. In time those things get put into check by the truth. I’m a word guy.
There was probably a much simpler (and cheaper) solution to all of this than spending weeks and months and years on all these different instruments. I could’ve probably saved myself a ton of time just by asking, “What brings me to tears . . . what truly moves me and makes me cry . . . ?” That’s easy. Songs. Lyrics. Stories.
And so that’s where I try to spend my time. Writing stories. Living stories. Capturing them and sharing them with others.
It is one of the things I love about filmmaking . . . the story aspect of it. I love that I can start with nothing . . . and create something special. Something that moves me deeply and makes me cry or laugh and both at the same time. Whether it’s a blog video or music project or TV show or even a film. It is storytelling.
And, for some reason, the visual part of it is more powerful than even music. To me it is. Especially when video is combined with music. I can listen to a song and be touched. Moved. But if I add the right images in the right places and listen again while I watch . . . what moved me before will kill me now. I will be in a puddle of tears on the floor.
I read somewhere that to be great at something, you need to put in at least ten thousand hours of practice. Let’s see, if I looked at that like a job . . . I’d have to spend forty hours a week for almost five straight years of my life, working five days a week, eight hours a day, to learn to be great at something. That is a ton of time.
And time is something I don’t have an unlimited amount of. So, instead, I have realized there will be lots and lots of things I’m not going to be great at. Things I might enjoy or even think are worthwhile . . . but I’ll never master them. And that’s okay with me.
I have learned to be perfectly happy with playing my guitar the way I play it. And with sitting down at the piano in the living room just messing around. Finding sounds and chords I like and enjoying it for what it is. Music. My music. Not the best. Not the worst. But it’s mine.
And Indiana likes to hear me play, just like her mama did before her. And that’s good enough for me.
The Bus Stops Here
My education of the education system.
I went to school wherever the big yellow bus that picked me up in front of the house we lived in took me.
It was as simple as that. My mother didn’t stress out about whether or not my brothers and sisters and I were getting a good education in the schools we were in; it was just what it was. We got whatever we got. And, somehow, it worked out fine.
And so when I grew up and had kids, I thought the same logic would hold true for mine, but it didn’t. Not by a long shot.
When Heidi and Hopie became school age, I did what my mother did . . . let my kids go to school wherever the bus that stopped in front of our apartment or house took them . . . but the schools they went to failed them. Even more than that, I failed my older daughters when it came to their education.
By the time Heidi was in fifth grade and Hopie in third, it was clear that the plan I had wasn’t working for them. For us. Heidi was being bused to an inner-city school in Nashville even though we lived in the suburbs (an effort by the city to try to make amends for different incomes, backgrounds, etc. that didn’t really work) . . . and she suffered on account of it. But it was Hopie who suffered the most. Her math and reading skills developed slower than Heidi’s did and slower than those of some of the other children her age. So she fell behind early on. When she was in third grade, I was in a meeting with her teachers, and the principal of the school told me that whatever hopes I had for Hopie having a higher education . . . I needed to rethink them. They made that decision that early and didn’t really even give her a chance.
I refused to listen to them, but, subconsciously, in the back of my mind, I think I let them tell me how it was going to be. And Hopie fell further and further behind. Hopie was a ninth-grader and in a free fall by the time Joey and I were married, and I finally became aware that there are other education options and I needed to look at them. But by then it was too late. Other schools would’ve gladly taken my money and tried to help Hopie, but what she needed was something much different, much sooner.
Looking back, I don’t think it was so much that Hopie needed the right school to go to as much as she needed someone who could say that this push to make everyone learn the same things the same way is a bunch of bunk. And the constant message to kids that getting into and going to college is the most important thing. I believe that reading and writing and arithmetic are fine, but a child’s character and life skills and compassion and heart are even more important than those things. Way, way more important than whether they go to college or get a degree. And Hopie’s scores in those areas from day one of school were off the charts.
But I let the school system fool me into thinking that Hopie was failing. That she wasn’t as good as the other kids. Even more so, I let Hopie believe that she wasn’t. She is twenty-nine years old now, and she believes it still. And it breaks my heart. Even as I write these words, I know her . . . and I know she is worried that I will write something that makes her look bad or gives the impression that she wasn’t as smart as other children were or as other women her age are now. But I am telling you, Hopie is brilliant, and she always has been.
Me, on the other hand, as Hopie was growing up . . . I needed some work. I was nowhere near the kind of father I should’ve been. The father that she and her big sister, Heidi, needed and deserved me to be.
A few years after Joey and I got married, I started doing some research, looking into homeschool and alternative education solutions in other parts of the country and the world, and realized that there are other great options available out there if you just seek them out. In Hopie’s last couple of years of school, I tried to assert myself and homeschool her, but I wasn’t prepared to do what I needed to do. To be who I needed to be as her father. I was still trying to do everything else and be everything else at the same time, and she got what was left over. She got my love but not my full attention.
I wish I could go back in time and redo so many things about the kids’ school years and put their hearts and their character development first, above their grades at school and test scores. That is probably why I have such an interest in Indiana’s future. In her education. And why I am trying to make some big decisions if that’s what it takes to give her what she needs to learn and be her best.
In some ways, Indiana’s education is easier, I think. Mostly because when people look at her, they expect her to be slower . . . to have lower grades and not be able to learn things as fast or in the same way as other kids. Hopie, on the other hand, didn’t have that luxury. She looked the same as every other kid. Maybe prettier or taller but t
he same on the outside. So they expected her to think and process and be the same on the inside too. And that’s a shame, in my opinion.
Mayberry
Trying to live in black and white.
Mount Pleasant is a little town about thirty minutes from our farm. It has a simple but charming downtown area with historic old buildings lining the street, and the first time I drove into it, there was a 1950s diner on the corner. I fell in love with it immediately.
A few months later I helped my sister open a small knickknack shop called Marcy’s Uniques & Antiques and was spending so much time there that I decided to open my own place. I rented a restored empty building where an old hardware store had been and set up a studio. Only I didn’t sell or show anything, I just worked there by myself. Writing songs and dreaming.
A lot of amazing things happened during the time I was in that little town. But the biggest one was meeting my wife, Joey. She happened to come to a songwriters’ night that I started in the hall above the ’50s diner, and that’s where we met. Six months later that hall was also where we had our wedding reception. Just down the street is the church where we got married, and across from that is where I tore down an old house to try to reclaim an almost two-hundred-year-old log cabin that was beneath it.
For some reason, actually lots of them, that little town resonated with me. It was like a place from my past. Or, more likely, a place that I wished was from my past. I had given my heart and life to God a year or two before, and He had been working on my character, leading me to be more than I was. To need less than I had.
And so I found myself setting up shop in that songwriting studio across from my sister and just down from the diner. It was Mayberry. Or at least I thought it was or could be. My girls were starting their seventh- and ninth-grade school years, and the schools that they’d been in weren’t working for them. They needed and deserved something better. And so I pulled them out of those schools and enrolled them in the ones in the small town. The kids rode the half hour or so to work with me in the morning, and I’d drop them off at school and park my truck a few blocks away in the square at my office. When school was over, they could walk to my office. I had installed a vintage Coke machine in my office, and it was filled with ice-cold soda bottles that they could enjoy after school.
It was heavenly. Actually, mostly the idea of it was heavenly. If you know me, you know that I see things a little differently than most people do. I somehow see the best side of things, the kindest, gentlest parts. And the parts that other people see first, the parts that keep them from jumping in with both feet . . . I somehow don’t even notice.
And for a while in that little town, it worked. It was sweet. I loved the people who worked in the other shops and the sense of community that had come with being there. Marcy and I would have coffee and a honey bun together at the diner every morning—something that we did in our childhood with our father . . . a memory recreated that you could live every day. And it was so neat. And I would visit with the local men who met for coffee, and they welcomed me in . . . the retired banker, the judge, the man who oversaw the electric company. And I’d get my hair cut at Speedy’s barbershop. It truly felt like a moment from another time.
Unfortunately, it was a moment from another time, and the truth of the era we were living in began to show up in a big way. First off, one morning I stopped in for coffee, and there was no one in the cafe, so I walked into the back room, and everyone was glued around a TV. Stunned. A plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in NYC. None of us could believe it. And as I stood there watching, another plane hit the other tower.
It was a wake-up call to the world and also to my little world. Things were not as rosy as they seemed.
A few blocks away both my girls started struggling with their new schools. The town had a brand-new middle school with a beautiful new arts department and stage, but Hopie was lost and way behind and felt even more alone than ever. Heidi was fitting in with the small-town kids in the high school, but it wasn’t a good thing. The school was drug-ridden, and a large number of the girls dropped out of school early, pregnant.
Heidi joined the girls’ volleyball team, and the school couldn’t afford to hire a coach, so they had a science teacher, who had no idea how to play volleyball, take over the job. I offered to come help. To coach for free. I played tons of volleyball in the service (a couple years of tournament play and coached a women’s team in Hawaii). It was a great idea, but a number of girls were unruly and foul-mouthed, and it made me want to find a way to be an even better coach and mentor to them and put in place a rule about no foul language. One of the parents complained, and the school board decided to have the teacher, who had never seen a volleyball, coach them instead. A short time later Heidi quit the team and never went back to volleyball.
My sister’s shop had to close down because there were no customers. I mean none. She might sell two dollars’ worth of stuff in a day or sometimes a week. The problem was that no one was coming to the square. Coming to town at all. The locals all shopped at the big-box retailers in Columbia, where you could get things cheaper and had more choices, and the tourists had no idea where this town was. And I began to see all the infighting among the shop owners. Though there were a number of people who believed in the town and saw the potential, they were overwhelmed by the ones who had been there their whole lives and accepted the status quo.
And I began to realize that you can’t will a town to life, no matter how much you try.
When Joey and I got married, she encouraged me to rethink what I was doing. She knew what I was trying to do there in that little town with my work and my girls—the life I was trying to live—but she also knew that it wasn’t realistic and where we were wasn’t the best thing for the kids or for me.
So we let the lease on the hardware store run out and sold the log cabin that we worked on and moved back home to the farm. We had never really left the farm, not really. For that year or so, we had been trying to juggle two lives and had put off living one there at the farm, in search of a better one somewhere else. Joey knew that was never gonna work and let me know that we needed to invest our time and money and lives in only one of them. And for her, there was only one real choice. Only one life that held a future for us, and that was at our farm.
And so I pulled the kids out of school again and moved our lives back to the farm. Heidi would end up in a private Christian school for her last three years and Hopie, too, for a while then homeschool. But, in the end, I think I hurt them more than helped them by pulling up stakes and moving to Mayberry.
The idea was solid, I think. A good one. But, in the end, the location was wrong. I have come to realize that Mayberry can still be . . . it just has to be wherever you are. You make Mayberry. We all do if we want it. And so it turns out it is right here. In our little community where my wife and sister’s restaurant, Marcy Jo’s, is and where our neighbors and we live. Hardison Mill. Pottsville. It is our Mayberry . . . a magical place that is straight out of another time. A TV show come to life. But it’s not perfect. It’s far from that. Nothing ever will be, and that’s okay. It just has to be perfect for us. And it is.
I made the trip back to Mount Pleasant this past June on Joey’s and my fifteenth anniversary. My cousin Aaron and I had dinner in the place where that diner used to be, and we walked the streets, and I told him stories from when we had tried to build a life there. And it was neat. Sadly, most of the stores and streets are still empty, and buildings are in worse shape than before. The hardware store where I had put my studio looks like it did when I walked away from it, only worse.
But there is growth in this area. Columbia, the town closest to where we live, is becoming more popular, and people are buying properties right and left and moving here from all over. The downtown square has been immaculately restored, and all the businesses are thriving. My guess is that Mount Pleasant will be next. In the next ten years or so, it will probably have its day again, and the streets wi
ll be filled and stores bustling with activity. And it will be what I hoped it was and more for someone else. For lots of people . . . looking for their own Mayberry.
Some Barn
Build it . . . and they will come.
I wanted a place to tinker on old cars. A man cave of sorts where I could turn rusty bolts with wrenches and get away from the hustle and grind of the music business. Joey and I had talked about building a new barn for a couple years, but it just didn’t make any sense at the time, and, besides, there was no real way to pay for it. But in 2004, a song about being on some beach somewhere changed that.
Paul Overstreet and I had met at a Starbucks near his farm in west Nashville one morning and were sitting drinking coffee and talking about song ideas we might write that day. One of us said “some beach” in a way that sounded like the ea in beach had a bit more of an i sound to it. And as men, who are just overgrown little boys, will do, we started giggling and singing more lines. Pretty soon we were sitting in Paul’s boat on Percy Priest Lake with a couple guitars in our hands, trying to get into character for this song we were writing about a beach.
I remember the sun starting to set on the water and my flip phone ringing with “JOEY” in big letters on the screen and me pretending that I didn’t see it. More than once. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to her, it’s just that we were on a roll and were getting dangerously close to finishing the song. By the time I got in my truck and called Joey back, saying something about “bad reception” and “lost track of time,” the song was complete. Even more than that, it sounded like a hit. And before long, it was.
