by Rory Feek
Heidi Caroline was born in the fall of 1986. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Pacing the hall of Beaufort Memorial Hospital, waiting for news, and the doctor coming out the double doors, telling me that I had a daughter. I was elated. I had always loved the idea of having babies. Of being a father. So when Heidi came along, it was a magical moment for me. I couldn’t get enough time with her. Her white-blond hair and soft blue eyes melted me and made me question what life was all about, what I was put on this earth for.
Unfortunately, her mom and I weren’t doing well, and as time went on, I grew closer to the baby and further from the baby’s mama. It’s not that she did anything wrong; I was just empty still. I’d had a couple of relationships before she came along that weren’t good ones, and I was restless and unhappy, I guess. Mostly unhappy with me. I would project that onto others for years to come before I finally came to realize that most of the problems in my relationships had to do with me and not the other person.
Sarah Hope was born almost two years later in the middle of a September night at Baptist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. We called her Hopie from the moment she took her first breath, and the name has been perfect for her. Filled with unwavering hope and joy and a childlike sense of naive wonder, she is exactly the opposite in many ways of her sister, who spends most of her days deep in thought, analyzing life to the nth degree. Heidi has always been the most like me, and Hopie is the most how I’d like to be. Together, they were my world, and I relished the time I had with them.
I had just returned from a six-month tour in Japan and was again stationed at the naval base outside of Memphis when Hopie was born. I was in the room helping her mom, trying not to faint, and found myself in complete awe of the miracle of childbirth. Hopie had long fingers and hands and immediately wrapped hers around mine with a strength that was very unlike a newborn. She is strong still. Physically and emotionally. It takes a lot to make Hopie cry, and she, at times, carries the weight of the world on her broad shoulders without anyone ever even knowing. She has always been solid as a rock in our family, and we would need a lot of stability in the years ahead.
In late 1988, when Hopie was just a few months old, we were transferred to the air station in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. I had always wanted to go there—who didn’t?—and as we settled into base housing, I spent my off time playing sand volleyball and enjoying the sun and scenery. We all did. But the distance between the girls’ mom and I had grown to a place where we could ignore it no longer. And soon she was on a plane headed to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with her mother and little brother. When she left, she took Hopie with her. Heidi stayed behind with me. I asked her to leave them both with me. I told her I would take the responsibility of them and she could start over with her life and have no ties to bind her. But in January of ’90, I found myself at the American Airlines terminal in Honolulu with a three-year-old in my arms and her sister boarding a plane for a new life without us.
I wish I could tell you the girls’ mother and I tried as hard as we could and that it just didn’t work out. But that’s not true. I was not a good man. I was unfaithful to her. And I was selfish and wanted more from life than the life we were building. In the end she, too, did some of the same things that I did and wasn’t true to me. But I take complete blame for the failure of the marriage. I could’ve done more. Could’ve been more.
Time has had a way of making me realize that we can either lay the blame for our problems on someone else, letting that be an excuse for why our life isn’t turning out the way we want it, or we can take the blame upon ourselves and let the responsibility for any change that should happen be on us. I don’t harbor resentment or hold grudges against the girls’ mom or anyone else. No one. It’s not in me. Not anymore. It took a lot of years to get a good perspective, but now I see how freeing it is and how good it feels to be completely responsible for my actions. Good and bad.
Five months later I was in the same airport, boarding a plane to Florida to pick up Hopie and bring her back home. Her mom had decided it was too much for her, and a chance at a do-over was what she really wanted and needed. So I brought my eighteen-month-old daughter back to Hawaii and reunited her with her sister, and the three of us became a family unit for the next twelve years. Until Joey would walk into my life and theirs and show us once and for all what real love was. But, in the meantime, I had to continue trying to figure it out on my own.
Fifteen
FROM TEXAS TO TENNESSEE
Once I was out of the service, we settled in Texas, where my mom and sister Marcy and older brothers were living. We lived with Marcy in a two-bedroom apartment for the first month or two. Me and the girls and the six members of my sister’s family. It was hard, but it was also great fun. It was nice for my kids to be around their cousins and for me to be near my family too.
I thought it would be easy to get a good job with my experience in the service, but it wasn’t. The Dallas market was flooded. So I started working temp jobs—sweeping floors and unloading boxes in a warehouse—and then realized I could make more money making music in the evenings. I found babysitters to keep the kids while I played in bars, and I picked them up at two or three a.m., my old PA system in the backseat still smelling of cigarette smoke and whiskey from the club. Some of my girls’ favorite memories, even today, are of them waking up as I was pulling our car into the Whataburger drive-through in the middle of the night. Ordering a breakfast-on-a-bun for them and me to share and telling them all about my evening as they sat together in the passenger seat with one seat belt around the two of them as we drove into the dark night.
We found an apartment in the Las Colinas area, and Heidi soon started kindergarten. I played music five or six nights a week, from nine ’til one a.m., and sometimes two shows on Friday and Saturday nights, adding the one at a different bar, from five ’til eight p.m., then packing up and hightailing it to the later gig. Most of the time I hated playing those shows, where the bars were empty and I was playing to a lone bartender or one couple across the dance floor or a few drunks, talking and yelling over the songs I was singing. But it’s where I cut my teeth, where I learned the craft of music. Of connecting with an audience, even when it’s darn near impossible. And it’s where the songs really got inside of me. I learned about writing great songs by singing great songs. It was an invaluable time for me as a musician and songwriter, and I look back on it with fondness now.
I drank too much. Slept with too many women. Made promises to some that I had no intention of keeping and I hated myself for it. But again, I didn’t know any other way. When your heart is empty, you try to fill it up with whatever is handy. Whatever the culture tells you will make things better. Beer. Girls. Money. None of it helped. For a few hours it did, maybe, but it didn’t last. It couldn’t.
In between the shows, girls, alcohol, and kids, I made some trips to Nashville. I had met a couple of aspiring songwriters in the Dallas area and made the drive with them to Music City to see how my songs would stack up against the professionals. It was humbling, to say the least. The first couple of meetings were confusing. One person liked a certain thing about a song I played but hated the rest, and in the next meeting that person said the exact opposite. I soon came to realize that there is no right answer. I also learned that when you come across or write a great song, no one argues with that. I would arrive back in Dallas each time with a fire in my belly and a renewed goal of writing something extraordinary—something that no one could deny.
By the time the girls and I packed our things and finally moved to Nashville, it was the fall of 1994. The first month we stayed with a lawyer friend of a friend named Rod Phelps, then moved into an apartment on the west side of town in the community of Bellevue. It was a beautiful complex, very picturesque, with three pools and a big pond in the center. The girls and I thought we’d died and gone to heaven.
At first I got a job delivering flowers for a florist but found myself lost too often and not delivering the arrang
ements on time, so I moved on to waiting tables during the lunch shift at an Applebee’s restaurant. But they had a thing called a “lightning lunch” that guaranteed that your lunch would be ordered and arrive back at your table within twelve minutes, or it was free. I bought a lot of free lunches in the month I worked there. I’m pretty sure the manager was glad to see me go. So was I.
We weren’t making it, and I knew it, so we moved most of our stuff into a storage unit nearby and moved back to Texas for a while and lived out of our suitcases. An old girlfriend and I decided to make a go of it again, and that lasted exactly six months—until I loaded us back into our ’56 Chevy and headed east for one more try in Nashville. It was September 1995. That would be the last move out of state we would ever make.
That old car was like a time machine for me. It somehow transported me to another day and time. To an era that I grew up hearing about from my father and had read about in books. It had no power steering and barely had any brakes at all, but I felt like somebody inside of it. The custom back license plate spelled out my name, RORYLEE, or at least most of it. This town might not know who I am, I thought as I drove it up and down Sixteenth Avenue, but they’re gonna know I’m here.
Nashville quickly became home to us. I signed a publishing deal with the great Harlan Howard—a legendary writer who wrote Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” Buck Owens’s “Tiger by the Tail,” and hundreds of others—and was soon being paid to do what I love for a living. The contract I signed was for three hundred dollars a week with no raises, and it was a five-year deal. In the first year, I think I wrote 350 songs. Just about a new one every day. I would make a writing appointment with a different person every day; sometimes I’d make two. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. It would be three years and hundreds of songs that no one would ever hear before I would get my first song recorded.
Every night in the little apartment we lived in, I knelt beside Heidi’s and Hopie’s bunk beds, held their hands, and said a prayer with them. We would pray for a good night’s rest and for our friends and family, but most of all we would pray for God to shine His light on one of my songs, to let it get recorded. We knew what that would mean and how much it could change our lives. We were living mostly on fish sticks, mac-and-cheese, and trips to Taco Bell’s drive-through for a handful of thirty-nine-cent tacos. It was a wonderful life, but we hoped for more. We believed it was possible.
And it was. A song I had written—with a friend of mine named Tim Johnson—called “Someone You Used to Know,” not only was recorded by a country artist named Collin Raye but also became a single and was played all over the radio and then hit number one on the Billboard charts. There must’ve been four hundred people at my first number-one party. I had made so many wonderful friends in Nashville. My mom drove in along with some aunts and uncles for the celebration. It was a big night for me. Bigger than I knew, actually. In a good way and a not-so-good way.
I had been dating a girl who was hell on me. And hell on my girls. We were on again, off again, and that night I think we broke up and got back together three times. She was excited for me and jealous and angry with me at the same time. After I got home and put the kids to bed, she and I were in the parking lot arguing. We both said some terrible things to each other, and out of anger, she took my car keys and drove off in her car. To show her who’s boss, I found my extra set of keys and drove to a 7-Eleven and fished through my wallet for an old girlfriend’s number and called her. The girl on the other end of the phone was more than excited to meet up and celebrate with a big number-one-hit songwriter, and so we did. When the sun came up the next morning, I was in that girl’s arms in the backseat of my car, behind some building on Music Row.
I hated myself for being there. I hated who I was. I hated that I had let the greatest night of my life be ruined because of my own insecurities and then gone a step further and spent the night with someone I didn’t care about. By the time I got home, everyone was waking up, excited to meet for breakfast and continue celebrating my accomplishment with me. As I sat with them in Cracker Barrel, hungover and looking like a zombie, I knew I had to do something. Had to change. Get my act together. But how?
Sixteen
SONG RIGHTER
I have said many times that I think I’ve spent too much of my life trying to write great songs and not enough time trying to be a great man.
It’s true. I thought success would bring happiness, but it’s the other way around. True joy and happiness have a way of attracting good things into your life. And if you aren’t already happy when you find success, it will make you more unhappy. It will amplify what’s already there. It did for me, anyway.
I had been going to church on and off for years. I’d joined and attended singles groups, and I’d even walked forward and given my life to Christ and been baptized. But nothing happened. I thought a brick would hit me in the head, and all of a sudden everything would be so much clearer and I’d be a different man. A better one. But it never happened, and I didn’t understand why. I had started going to a Bible study on Sixteenth Avenue on Music Row a couple of years before, but I had mostly sat in the back—listening, reading, wondering if all this was really true. I wanted my life to change, but I didn’t want to be turned into one of those boring, Goody Two-shoes Christian guys who I had met by the dozens. The ones who spoke of “being in the blood” and looked like they had never done anything wrong in their lives. I couldn’t relate to them. Not in the least.
My world and my people were welfare and food stamps and cars that didn’t run, and ex-wives and pain and sorrow. I felt like if I became a real Christian, I would be neutered. That all the real fun in life would go away. Yes, I would be more honest and a better man, but I’d be vanilla and plain and a nobody. I didn’t want to be that. To others, I might have looked like someone who was successful, but inside I was still nobody—and that scared me.
So I kept doing things my way. Learning the hard way. Opening my hand a little at a time, trusting God with my life and my fears a little more, and a little more, until one day I found myself at a crossroad.
The money from my first hit song had bought the farmhouse we live in and royalties from the second had started fixing it up some. I was becoming a better man, little by little, and was feeling inspired by some fairly good choices I had made. But I was still struggling with giving absolute control of my life over to someone other than me . . . to Him. During this time, Mom was living in an RV across from our driveway (this was before it wouldn’t run and would be permanently parked at a lot by the interstate a few miles from the farmhouse). The girls enjoyed having my mom in our lives, getting off the bus and sitting with her in lawn chairs while she smoked and told stories of the good old days, when their old man was young and the only cereal we had to eat was crumbled bread in a bowl with milk on it. And God was working on me.
I was dangerously close to turning it all over to Him, to surrendering everything once and for all. And I think the devil knew it too. I didn’t know if the devil was real or not, but I knew the Bible talked about him being tossed out of heaven and having a pull on us, making us want to put ourselves first, to do sinful things, and that was something I could relate to. I could feel a fight going on inside of me, between good and evil. The promise of hope was battling with the truth of who I was inside . . . the me that no one really knew. They were fighting it out, and it was killing me.
Late one night I got in my car and headed up the interstate. Tears were falling down my cheeks, and I was crying out to God.
Part of me wanted to leave the old me behind and start walking a new path, no matter how scary it was. Another part of me was saying, Let’s just get out of here. You’re just gonna screw those kids up because you’re worthless. Let’s get out of here!
I drove to a big park and walked around. For hours and hours. It was late at night, and I hadn’t told the kids or anyone that I was leaving or when I would be back. I just kept walking. And crying. And then
I drove into downtown Nashville and walked those streets. I walked by the bus station where I had been during my first trip to Nashville, and I went in and sat down. Then I went to the counter and asked for a bus ticket. The lady at the counter said, “Where to?” I said, “Anywhere but here, lady.” I boarded a Greyhound bus, and as it drove off, I stared out into the night. I imagined that I would end up at the ocean somewhere and would get a job on a boat, using a different name, keeping who I was a secret and starting a new life. One that didn’t have the responsibilities I had. Didn’t have the history or the emptiness. I could just be free. Invent a new identity and make a new life, leaving the old one behind.
But then I thought of my girls. What would happen to them? When they woke up and realized that I was gone and wasn’t coming back? Would my mother raise them? Would they hate me? Or be better off without me? And I thought about God. This God who was supposed to come inside me if I asked for Him and fill me up so I wouldn’t feel alone or so empty anymore. Where was this God? A million things went through my mind that night.
When I came to, the bus was in Louisville, Kentucky. Dropping off and picking up some more passengers. I got off and walked to the bathroom. Numb. Dead inside. I splashed some water on my face in a dirty sink and looked up. And then it happened. I saw him. Me. Him. God. Him in me. In the mirror. As I stood in the bathroom of that Greyhound station, I saw myself, and it suddenly occurred to me, for the first time, that maybe He was already there. Already in me. And all I had to do was believe it. I dried my hands, went to the counter, and bought another ticket, this time for home, then boarded a bus headed south for Nashville.