Country singer Joey Martin Feek, who with her husband, Rory Feek, comprised the country/bluegrass duo Joey + Rory, passed away on March 4, 2016 following an extended and brave period of battling cervical cancer. She was just 40 years old. Joe + Rory were the antithesis of everything that Nashville and today’s glossy, image-driven country music, has supposedly been all about over the past 20 odd years. Rory, with his bib-overalls, and Joey, usually dressed like a cowgirl with her wranglers and boots, avoided the image-makers and radio committees. In fact, in their songs and recordings, they would often make playful digs at the Nashville music business machinery.

I have been a massive fan of Joe + Rory ever since I heard their 2008 debut album THE LIFE OF A SONG, released on Sugar Hill following the duo’s acclaimed appearance on CMT’s competition Can You Duet? earlier that year. Joey (Martin) and Rory (Feek) were not your usual reality show participants. They were a couple of serious musicians, who had worked diligently at their craft. Not only great singers, but also skilled songwriters, seasoned performers and first rate musicians. Both had been in Nashville a dozen years or so, Rory achieving a little success as a songwriter, and Joey supplementing her singing earnings by waiting tables and baking bread.

When they entered Can You Duet? they were not even a duo act, but the success and publicity they received from the series made the choice for them, and so Joey + Rory was born. Most of the acts on the series were, for want of a better word, Nashville clones. They were all modern pop-country acts looking and hoping for mass acceptance and they didn’t care what they had to do to achieve that goal. Joe and Rory were first-and-foremost passionate fans of country music, so for them there was no compromise in order to please the judges or the audience.

Joey Martin was born on September 9, 1975 in Alexandria, Indiana, a small farming and factory town. One of five children, she grew up with three sisters and one younger brother (Jody, Julie, Joey, Justin and Jessie). Her father Jack, a guitar-playing General Motors worker and her mother June, a farm-raised gospel singer, married after his return from Vietnam and their passion for music was passed down to their middle child Joey. Her first performance was at her first grade talent show, where she sang Coat of Many Colours with dad playing guitar and the rest of the school watching in awe as the six year old sung her heart out for all of them to see and hear. She has been on stage ever since…

Because of her love of horses, after graduating high school, Joey got a job as an assistant for a horse veterinarian in the area, where she continued working for the next three years, all the while playing music around Madison county. On August 15, 1998, Joey’s mother helped her pack her things into a cattle trailer and they moved her to Nashville—actually an hour south of Music City to a small rustic cabin in Lewisburg, Tennessee to go to work for another horse vet there. Through the cutting-horse business, she soon met Wilbur Rimes (father of Leann Rimes) and later Barbara Brooks and her husband Kix (of Brooks & Dunn). Joey was soon working full time at the Rimes’ barn in Lebanon, taking care of their cattle and horses and watching songwriter nights in Nashville on the weekends. She was hard to miss in her wranglers and boots, with a knife in her back pocket, driving down the road in a Dodge 4x4 truck with her dog Rufus in the back. She met Rory, her future husband, at one of those writers’ nights, as she told me a few years ago.

“I met him first in song at the Bluebird in Nashville, and I became such a big fan. I didn’t move here to be a writer. I moved here to be a singer and I never had any experience in songwriting at all. So the first song I wrote here was with him. He has this sort of way of telling the story in a short amount of time and crafting it … it’s so conversational and it’s well-spoken that for me, when I hear a song that moves me that way, I feel like I can just grasp it and touch it. Co-writing together, it’s hard for me to just sit there for that long and use my brain for that long, but he’s so good at it and makes those things come to life exactly how I wanted to say it.”

I met with Joey and her husband at noted producer and recording engineer Gary Paczo’s Green Hills recordings studio. They were out back, loading instruments and speakers into a van. They were the friendliest of couples, down-home and polite in that endearing southern way. They’d just completed filming the video for Josephine, the epic Civil War-inspired song that opened their third album HIS AND HERS.

“With songwriting, Rory and I are so much alike when it comes to music and things that we like, things that we listen to and songwriting has been such a big part of even us meeting,” Joey explained. “We’re very blessed because we hardly ever argue and we’re together every moment of every day,” Rory added, looking adoringly at his wife. “We just like spending time together, because she’s truly a singer and I’m truly a songwriter. I refer to her gift of singer and she refers to my gift of songwriting, although I sing and I feel like I complement her and she will write and complement me. She believes in what I do and I believe in what she does and it works really well.”
Their passion for their music just totally filled the room as we sat there and chatted for some 40 minutes. They were honest people with pure integrity when it came to their career and making music. You didn't need to be told that what they had was genuine. Just listen to their music and you can tell that what they had was the real-deal, …not just as a musical duo, but as a couple. The deep connection they had doesn’t just shine through their music, it’s the reason their music shines.
Joey’s 2005 single That’s Important To Me, a co-write with the late Tim Johnson, is an emotional confirmation that living by simple rules and morals are much more important than all the money and commercial trappings that have polluted modern life.

“Everyone has an opinion about what will and won’t work,” Joey, explained, “but one thing we have learned along the way is to be true to who you are, present honest music and let the fans decide. Some of our songs have really strong messages so we like to lighten it up by having a good time. The message is still there, but it’s a lot more fun to deliver it that way—we don’t ever want to take ourselves too seriously.”

Joey married Rory on June 15, 2002, and helped raise his two then-teenage daughters from a previous marriage, Heidi and Hopie. The couple set up home way outside of Nashville in an 1870s Pottsville, Tennessee, farmhouse, living what must have seemed like an idyllic life away from the rat-race. Rory would spend time writing songs and tinkering with old cars, Joey gardening or baking bread at Marcy Jo’s Mealhouse, the local restaurant she owned with sister-in-law Marcy.
For a time they hosted their own television series, the Joey+Rory Show on RFD-TV, that was filmed entirely at their farm and in their community. A mix of live performances, recipes from their café, behind-the-scenes looks into their life together and intimate acoustic performances from the duo and a select group of singers and songwriters that inspire them, the show was very much down-home, family viewing. Completely at odds with the majority of television programmes that are force-fed on an unsuspecting public these days.

The couple’s idyllic life was shattered when Joey was diagnosed with cancer in May 2014, about three months after giving birth to the couple’s daughter, Indiana. She underwent an aggressive treatment plan that included a hysterectomy and other surgeries, as well as chemotherapy and radiation, which she resumed again in 2015 after the cancer returned. Rory recorded his wife’s battle with the cancer through pictures on the couple’s Facebook and Instagram pages and through heartbreaking updates posted to his blog, ‘This Life I Live.’

Last October, Joey decided to stop treatment. The family then relocated from their Tennessee farm house so that Joey could enter hospice care in her hometown of Alexandria, Indiana. She was able to celebrate Christmas with her family, her daughter Indiana’s second birthday and Valentine’s Day with her husband Rory and her daughter, before lapsing into a coma from which she was never to recover.

Alongside the personal family memories for her loved ones, Joey Martin Feek also left behind the rich legacy of her music, which for me remains timeless, heartfelt and totally honest. She was a highly distinctive vocalist with great empathy for lyrics and the ability to connect instantly with the listener. Among some of my favourites from their eight albums are Waiting For Someone, a compelling tale of a chance meeting in a bar of two lonely people both hoping to meet someone special, In A Cowboy’s Dream, a captivating co-write by Joey and Rory with Jenny Yates in which they weave an intriguing fabric of the western code with great skill and straightforward lyricism.

and Joey’s soul stirring vocals that totally own Stephanie Davis’ Just Another Cup Of Coffee. They all bear Joey’s one overriding requirement: “It has to be genuine, it has to be honest, it has to be sincere.”