On Saturday night, September 24, 2016, Rory Feek stepped onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry for the first time without his wife, Joey. She had died of cancer on March 4 of that year, and he was not there to perform. The Whites, longtime friends of the couple, called him out during the 8:30 segment, and the audience rose to its feet before he could get a word out. Rory later wrote on his blog, This Life I Live, that the moment felt “beautiful and surreal at the same time.”
When the applause finally settled, he told the crowd he was honored to be back, and that even without his bride, he was there with “someone both Joey and I loved.” That someone was Bradley Walker, and the reason Bradley was at the Opry that night goes back to a hymn, a honeymoon, and the last item on Joey’s funeral list.
A little church at the foot of the Bitterroots
Joey and Rory married in 2002 and spent their honeymoon in Montana. In the small town of Darby, they walked into a little church at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains and heard a mother and daughter sing “Leave It There,” the old Charles Albert Tindley hymn about carrying your burden to the Lord and setting it down. Rory has written that something told them right then that those words were going to matter.
The couple later recorded the hymn themselves. Then, in the last months of her life, Joey shared her funeral wishes with her family: a plain wooden box built by their friend Thomas, a quilt made by her friend Ms. Joan, and a simple service in the concert hall on their Tennessee farm. The last thing on her list was that hymn. Rory recounted the exchange this way:
“I’d like for someone to sing the hymn ‘Leave It There’ at my graveside.” And then she stopped and added, “No… not someone… I want Bradley Walker to sing it for me.”
The friend she chose
Bradley Walker grew up in Athens, Alabama, and has used a wheelchair all his life because of muscular dystrophy. He sang with the Oak Ridge Boys on national television when he was ten, won Male Vocalist of the Year from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2007, and kept a full-time job as a materials analyst at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. He had known Joey and Rory since 2007, and the three of them sang together on stages around the country.
Bradley later said the night Joey died, Rory called and asked him to come up to the farm and sing. When a request like that comes, he said, “the only answer is, ‘Yes.'” He also admitted he could hardly take it.
“Who’s that?”
The service was held on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in March, and Bradley sang “Leave It There” at Joey’s graveside. Among the friends gathered there was Bill Gaither, the gospel legend whose Gaither Music Group had released Joey and Rory’s final recordings. According to Rory, Gaither leaned over and asked someone, “Who’s that?” Barry and Paul, the men who ran the Gaither label, were there too, and they felt the same thing.
Gaither Music signed Bradley. Over the following months, Rory produced his album Call Me Old-Fashioned, a collection of faith-filled country songs, and a concert special was filmed in the Feeks’ barn. The record even carries a duet with Joey on “In the Time That You Gave Me,” with her earlier recorded vocal joined to Bradley’s.
Back under the Opry lights
Call Me Old-Fashioned was released on September 23, 2016, one day before Rory walked back onto the Opry stage to introduce him. Bradley debuted two new songs that night, opening with the title track, in front of roughly four thousand people. When he finished, the crowd stood again.
Rory wrote that he watched Bradley from the wings with tears in his eyes, and that the long ovation that had greeted him earlier felt like it was for Joey, and for the two of them. The hymn she first heard in a little Montana church had carried her friend all the way to the Opry.