by Rory Feek
A year or so later we came to the premiere, and they gave us all hats that they’d made up with the production company logo on it. Their logo was a dog on a car. It was pretty special. Rufus took pictures with the stars and even walked the red carpet with my bride. It was a day we would never forget.
I’d never seen a dog who loved someone as much as Rufus loved Joey. Or an owner who loved a dog as much as she did him. A number of years later, after Rufus passed away, Joey got another puppy that we named Ranger, who grew up to be just like Rufey. Though he was a completely different breed—smaller, with much more fur—he was almost like the exact same dog. He loved Joey with all his heart and would do just about anything she asked him to do.
Ranger’s seven years old now. Still just as smart and obedient for me as he was for my bride. Maybe I need to pull my ’54 Oldsmobile into the yard and put a rug on top of her, and see if Ranger wants to take a ride.
Heartlight
We auctioned ourselves off . . . and it changed our lives.
It was a sold-out event. A fund-raiser for Heartlight, a teens-at-risk ministry in Texas that was started and is run by a friend of ours named Mark Gregston. Joey and I were the special entertainment for the evening, and we performed after the dinner while the silent auction was going on.
The show had gone well, and we were done. Sitting at our table about to pick up a glass of wine and enjoy ourselves for a little while. But something told me we should do more. Give more. Joey thought so too. So I called the auctioneer over.
Within a few minutes we were back up on the stage but this time with the auctioneer, and he was taking bids on us. We had decided to auction ourselves off. We would come anywhere and play a show for the highest bidder. It wasn’t like us to do something like that because we had been on the road traveling so much and were tired and just wanted to be home. Besides, you never know where you might end up, and once you commit, there’s no going back.
The next few minutes were a blur. Folks bidding and the number rising. I think someone paid fifteen thousand dollars for us that evening, and when it was over, Joey was looking at me like, “What have we done?” But we loved our friend Mark and knew that he was doing amazing work there for struggling teenagers, and the money they raised would be helpful.
“Rory and Joey . . . I’d like you to meet the woman who purchased you,” Mark said. And a tall, pretty lady with a newborn in her arms said, “Hello, I’m Kris.” Both my wife and I immediately liked her and knew all would be fine.
“My parents have a wedding anniversary, and my mom loves you guys . . . and I thought I’d surprise them and have you come sing for their party.”
Joey and I had no idea who this lady was or who her parents were.
We found ourselves on an airplane a few weeks later, headed back to Texas to sing at a party. When we got to the place where we were singing, it was at a very beautiful home north of Dallas. And the party was downstairs, in a basement area in one of their guest quarters. But there were only about a dozen people there. Maybe less. It was just the couple and a few other couples from their church that they were close friends with. We ate barbecue and visited and loved every one of them immediately. Then we sang a few songs. We didn’t need a microphone or PA system, we just gathered our chairs in a circle and sang for them.
A few songs later they started singing for us. Old hymns. Joey loved it so much. And she loved them, especially the couple we were there to sing for. We both did.
In the coming months and years, we became close friends and made many trips back to see them, or they would make trips to come see us play. Me becoming closer to the man, who would become more of a father figure to me than anyone in the last twenty years, and Joey growing closer to his wife.
We are still friends. They mean the world to us. Because they have changed our lives.
They are the ones who stepped in and funded the crazy idea I had of making a weekly television show at home and saw to it that our dream of turning the story of Josephine into a movie became a reality.
It is amazing to think that when we raised our hand that evening and gave ourselves away, we had no idea God would use that moment to bring some very special people into our lives who would change everything for us. For our careers.
And not just our careers. Our hearts and our lives.
When Joey was recovering from her cancer surgery, they brought their plane to the hospital to pick us up and bring us home, so Joey didn’t have to make the long drive home from Chicago. And they have continued to care and love on us and be here for us through it all. Like ours, their tears have never stopped falling for the loss of Joey.
A few weeks before we found out that the chemo and radiation weren’t working and decided to stop treatments, we were in Texas performing at another fund-raiser. Joey was very weak but loved her time on stage and was thankful for the chance, for thirty minutes or so, to take her mind off all she’d been through and just sing and tell our story.
The same lady who bought us, Kris, was in the audience. As were her parents and a number of the folks who’d been at the original fund-raiser and anniversary dinner where we sang. In tears, Joey and I told the story about how we had nervously given ourselves away years before and had received so much more in return than we ever dreamed. And when the show was over, dozens—maybe hundreds—of men in the audience gathered around us and laid their hands on my sweet bride and prayed for a miraculous healing of her body. We held each other and cried and cried.
I think our friends are crying still. Missing Joey. Wishing that miracle had come true. But both she and I knew that another miracle had already happened. That they were our miracle.
Thank you, Ray and Linda, we love you.
Bare-Metal Truth
The truth hurts . . . but it mostly makes me smile.
Russdriver, as we affectionately call him, has got a gift and it’s not just driving and fixing buses, although he’s pretty darn good at those things too.
The first old car I tinkered with in the new barn was a 1956 Buick I had bought from a parking lot for three hundred dollars. It was white and orange . . . the orange was actually spots where the years of sitting out in the rain had turned the metal to rust or, in a lot of places, had eaten right through the metal, and there were gaping holes in the car. The interior was in even worse shape than the body, and that’s saying a lot. But I had big dreams of fixing her up and taking my bride to the drive-in and having people knock on the window and point and say, “Man, what a beautiful ride.”
Unfortunately, what I didn’t have much of was experience and skills when it came to fixing and restoring old cars. I had none, actually. But now I had a shop and a bunch of new tools and some time on my hands. So I rolled up my sleeves and started in. Mostly sanding. The first thing I did was strip everything off the car and start trying to sand her down to bare metal. My hope was to have her ready to paint in a couple weeks.
But days of sanding turned into weeks, and still there was a ton left to do. I had a couple of the fenders done, and that’s about it when the time came for Joey and me to go back out on the road. When Russell pulled up in the big tour bus, I showed him the progress I’d made on the car and told him about my big dreams. We loaded up, and as we were about to head out, I saw Thomas, our farmhand and handyman at the farm, feeding our cow. The weather was beginning to drop below freezing, and there wasn’t much for him to do on the farm for the next week or two, so I mentioned to him, if he found himself with some spare time, not to be afraid to pick up a sander and see if he could make any headway.
Ten days later the tour bus pulled back into the farm with Joey and I thankful to have a series of shows out in the Midwest completed and ready to be back home for a while. As we unloaded our clothes and guitars from the bus, I walked into the shop area of the big barn and saw my Buick sitting there. The whole thing had been sanded down to shiny metal. Every inch of it. I called out to Russ and Joey to come look.
“Wow!!!” Russell sai
d, as he walked around looking at the bumper-to-bumper bare metal, and Joey stood by my side smiling. “You know you’ve made it when you can hire someone to do your hobbies for you!!”
Joey started laughing, and so did I. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. Russ always has a way of boiling a situation down to the bare-metal truth. He always has.
One time, a couple years later, when I was trying to figure out if I should join a gym to start working out or not, I asked Russell what he thought I should do. I felt like I needed to do something since I was getting older and needed to take better care of myself. But the closest gym was a pretty good drive away, and I’d have to pay a monthly fee to work out there, and usually you don’t follow through on it . . . and on and on my concerns went.
“You’re brilliant,” he said. “While other people are paying money each month to pick up some heavy things from one spot and move them to another . . . you have all these rocks and firewood here at your farm. You are able to pick them up and move them around for free!”
I didn’t much like his answer at the time, but it was true. I did have lots of ten- and twenty- and fifty-pound rocks and logs and bags of feed that I could just pick up and work out with here at the farm. And it wasn’t really even working out, it was just called working. The way that people have kept themselves in good shape for the history of time, before the gym and fitness industry came in and changed how we look at things.
I love our bus driver Russell so much. But he is wrong about one thing . . . I’m not the brilliant one. Russ is. He knows just what to say and when to say it, to make you see things in a new and better light.
Brand-New Bus
We’ve never had a brand-new bus. But then again, we have. Many, many times.
Joey and I only owned two tour buses in our lives and music career together, and they both were old. One was ancient, built in 1955, and the other was more of a middle-aged coach that we named Coach, and it came rolling off the assembly line in 1990. They’d each had a million or more miles of hauling hard-living dreamers and band members up and down the highways of America, long before they hauled us and our dogs, Rufus and then Ranger, and, in time, our baby girl, Indiana.
Joey and I loved those buses and the history that came with them. The ’55 had been a passenger bus back in the day. I got it from a man in Canada who’d got it from God knows how many other men who got it from other men. Somewhere along the line someone turned it into a tour bus with bunks and a small kitchen and living area. The fella I got it from, John Foot, had recently given her a new paint job. And though I didn’t have as much money as he was asking for her in my pocket when we arrived at his house after an eight-hour drive north from Indiana, he took what I had and decided my handshake was good for the rest, and it was.
My father-in-law and brother-in-law went with me to look at it that day in ’05. Not just to look at it but to pick it up. You can’t make a drive that far and say, “I’ll go home and think about it.” You’ve got to think fast and make a decision. My thinking ended with Joey’s daddy and me driving across the Canadian border at about two in the morning with no title or papers saying we owned it and my brother-in-law behind us in his SUV. The authorities just looked at us in the office that night, then out the border office window at the bus, then back at us and the bus again. Then, for some reason, said, “Okay, you’re good to go,” and let us cross the bridge and try to make it back to Tennessee or however far we were gonna get before it broke down. I figure they must’ve just felt sorry for us. For the drive and the future in front of us with the old girl.
I dropped off Joey’s daddy, Jack, at his house in Indiana in the early morning and pulled into our driveway late that afternoon. My eyes about as bloodshot as my nerves. Joey met me in the driveway. Skeptical but with a big smile and a cup of coffee. “She’s beautiful,” Joey said as she hugged me, like I’d just bought something wonderful instead of the death trap that it was.
Like I had with the other old cars in the barn, I had visions of fixing her up and driving my wife around the country, going from radio station to radio station, trying to get the DJs to play Joey’s beautiful songs so people could hear them. I sorta saw myself like Loretta Lynn’s husband, Doolittle, in the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter. But before we ever got to a radio station, the bus broke down and left us stranded on the side of the interstate. We called for help, and my sister picked up Joey and took her home. I stayed with the bus till a wrecker came . . . about four hours later. Freezing to death, with no heat and no way to start the bus to stay warm, as car after car stopped, I waved them on, saying, “No, I’m okay; there’ll be a wrecker along soon.”
It was the middle of the night when we finally pulled into the driveway with me riding shotgun in the wrecker and the bus being drug, literally, behind. She was in bad shape, and my spirits were at rock bottom. The bus stayed parked for months and months. Till another wrecker came and took it to a shop that said, “We can fix it, but it’ll cost ya.” By then Joey wasn’t so gracious. The beautiful old girl was becoming a bit of a nightmare and a money pit. So there she sat. Until Russ came along, that is.
Russdriver owned a couple of other buses, and by this time, Joey’s and my music career had taken off with a bang. We were traveling all across the country, going from radio station to station, and show to show. All pretty much on airplanes. My wife wanted off the planes and onto a bus. A real bus. And so Russ leased one to us one weekend, then he drove us to some shows in another bus he had a few weeks later. Not long after, he was sitting at our kitchen table and going through the numbers with me, trying to see if we could afford to lease a bus for a few months and not have to fly anymore. It’s what Joey desperately wanted and what I wanted to make happen for her.
After some quick figuring, his smile turned to a frown, and he showed me how the numbers were never gonna work. He stood up to shake my hand and leave, but, for some reason, I got a crazy idea in my head.
“We got an old bus,” I said. “Since we can’t afford you or a nice bus . . . is there any chance you might help us fix up the one we have and travel with us . . . as part of our family?”
Now, Russ has a million-dollar smile, and, all of a sudden, his face was filled with it.
“I’m in,” he said, as he shook my hand. And that was that. Russdriver was part of the family. And the family had commitments to make, and Mama wanted to drive to them.
And so we and Russ and our handyman, Thomas, got the bus back to the farmhouse and started fixing it up. We got her running and then gutted it and put in a couch and a glider and a coffee maker so it would feel like home. Joey made curtains, and we even put in a desk so I could work as we drove down the road. Home but not at home. That was the goal. And we hit it.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t break down now and then or that we didn’t have to run alongside of it with a stick pointed at the gearbox and Russell yelling, “Now!” as loud he could so we could get it into second gear and I could jump in and we could head to a festival in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, or a show at a military base in Aberdeen, Maryland, or some place in between.
We spent some time on the side of highways and backed into garages in places like Beulah, Wyoming, and Hiawatha, Kansas. But, for some reason, those things were fun to Russell. He lived for problems that would come our way in the old bus. If the lights started to dim as we headed down Monteagle Mountain in the middle of the night, he’d say, “Generator’s failing . . . next exit’s eighteen miles . . . this is gonna get exciting!” And we’d go flying down the mountainside with no lights on and him so excited to get to an exit and pull out his toolbox and try to troubleshoot the problem. And he always did. I don’t know how, but he did. We never missed a show or a station visit. Never even late for one.
But that wasn’t the amazing part. It was when we got back in the bus that the magic happened. He would fire it up and yell, “Wahoo!! It’s a brand-new bus.” And he meant it. That’s how he saw it. It was different now. What we were driving
down the road from that moment on wasn’t what he had before. It was better. Way better. Perfect, actually.
And he wasn’t just that way with our old tour buses, he was that way with everything. Anything. One little improvement, and it was a whole new thing. Or a whole new person. Yesterday melted away, and all there was was right now, and right now is amazing! What a gift Russ has.
But the best part of all is that it’s contagious. Soon Joey and I felt the same way about the bus and about every other bump in the road that we faced. Just a little improvement, and it was a brand-new situation.
I believe that Russell, and how he sees life, had an influence on Joey and is part of why she looked at things with so much positivity when she was going through her battle with cancer. And why I see the good in life now after so many tough things have happened.
We sold our 1990 tour bus, Coach, in 2015, when Joey’s cancer came back. Actually, Russ sold it for us.
We didn’t have any need for it anymore, and, besides, with all the medical expenses that were being racked up, we could use the money. And though Russ was now technically out of a job with us . . . he never stopped working for us. I would suspect it’s because if you asked him, his job wasn’t driving a tour bus . . . it was loving us and taking care of us. Bus or no bus. And he was, and is, brilliant at his job.
He helped us fix up our old 1955 bus and hauled us all across the country with no power steering and no A/C when our career was just getting started. And when we moved up to a 1990 Silver Eagle a few years later, he was still behind the wheel. Still driving all night, getting to gigs and setting up merchandise for us, sound-checking our guitars and taking pictures for fans at meet and greets. He was also making sure that Joey had something healthy to eat in a hundred green rooms all across the country. All he was being paid to do was drive; the rest of it was because he loved us. And because he was part of our family. He still is.