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

Author:Rory Feek [Feek, Rory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Memoir
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2017-02-14T08:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Eight

MY NAME IS JOEY

She ran up those steps two at a time and landed there, right in front of me. Faded jeans, dusty boots, and a button-up shirt. I had no idea my life was about to change forever.

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

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