Just Now — The morning was quiet, like most are on the farm. Dew still clung to the tall grass, and the coffee was still warm in his hand. But what filled Rory Feek’s heart wasn’t the silence outside — it was a song he hadn’t thought about in years, until today.
“Iris DeMent,” he whispered into the still air, “She had a way of singing the truth so simple, it felt like prayer.”
The song — one he first heard on a radio in 1994, long before Joey, long before Indiana, long before the world knew his name — came back to him like an old friend. Maybe it was “Let the Mystery Be.” Or “Our Town.” He doesn’t say exactly which. But the feeling? He remembers that clearly.
“I was living in a small house, trying to be a songwriter and barely believing I could,” Rory recalled. “And then this voice came through the speakers — raw, unpolished, and full of soul. It sounded like home.”
Back then, Rory was still learning how to put emotions into melody, still searching for his own sound. But Iris… she was already there. Already telling the truth without trying to make it rhyme too pretty.
“She wasn’t trying to impress anybody,” he said, smiling. “She just sang like she had something to say — and she meant every word of it.”
That one song, heard by chance, didn’t change his life overnight — but it planted a seed. The kind that would someday grow into a quiet voice of his own, filled with family, faith, grief, and grace.
“It’s funny how songs come back to you,” Rory added. “Especially the ones that met you when you were still becoming.”
Today, as he walks across the gravel path outside the old farmhouse, he’s humming that Iris DeMent tune again — the one he first heard thirty years ago. The one that never really left.
And just like that, music becomes memory. And memory becomes prayer.