In 2021, Eddie Montgomery was asked to write the theme song for a small western called Old Henry. The film told the story of a widowed farmer trying to protect his teenage son. The song he brought back was called “My Son,” and by the time it was finished, Eddie said it was no longer really about the movie.
He believed his two late sons and his old partner, Troy Gentry, had helped him write it.
A western about a father and his boy
Old Henry was written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli and starred Tim Blake Nelson as Henry, a quiet farmer raising his son, Wyatt, alone on a homestead. When the two take in a wounded stranger carrying a satchel of cash, men come looking for the money, and Henry’s hidden past starts to come back to the surface. Trace Adkins and Stephen Dorff were also in the cast.
The film had a close connection to Eddie’s own career. It was produced by Shannon Houchins, a co-founder of Average Joes Entertainment, the label putting out Eddie’s first solo album, and who co-produced that album with Noah Gordon. Old Henry premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 7, 2021, then opened in about 30 American theaters on October 1. The soundtrack opened with “My Son” and closed with an end credits version of the same song.
It started with his father
Eddie said he watched the trailer and went through the script looking for something to hold onto. The first thing the story gave him was his own father.
Eddie grew up in Kentucky, in a family that worked tobacco and the hay fields and did not have much money, but always had music. His parents ran a band of their own, Harold Montgomery and the Kentucky River Express, and Eddie was playing with them as a young boy. He has called his father a hero. He also remembered one line his old man used to give him: son, do as I say, don’t do as I do.
He sat down with Noah Gordon, who was producing his album, and the two started talking. Eddie told Billboard that he kept asking himself what he would tell his own sons, and what his father had told him. The song came out of that conversation quickly.
Two sons, two Septembers
The question of what to tell his sons was not an easy one for Eddie Montgomery. He had already lost two of them.
In 1991, his three-year-old son was killed in a car accident. More than two decades later, on September 24, 2015, his 19-year-old son, Hunter, was taken to the University of Kentucky’s hospital in Lexington after an accident that left him on life support. Three days later, on Sunday, September 27, the family let him go. Hunter had become a father himself only a few months earlier, to a baby boy named Bennett. Eddie’s public statement that morning was short. He wrote that his son Hunter had gone to heaven, and he asked for privacy while the family said goodbye.
Two Septembers later, on September 8, 2017, Troy Gentry was killed in a helicopter crash in New Jersey. The two Kentucky men had played together since the early 1990s and had built Montgomery Gentry into a duo with more than 20 hit singles and a place in the Grand Ole Opry. Eddie called him T-Roy.
Talking about those losses in the fall of 2021, Eddie summed it up in one line. September, he said, is not his favorite month.
What the song became
Eddie said the writing kept going back into his soul. He thought about how he had taught his sons to live, and about telling them that some of the things he had chased in his own life, he probably should not have.
The finished song is a father talking to his boy. He asks him not to make the mistakes he made and not to waste his life running. He tells him to go ahead and chase his dreams, and reminds him of the one thing he can never outrun: he will always be his son.
Eddie gave much of the credit to the people he had lost. Speaking to People, he put it plainly:
“I think my sons and T-Roy helped me write this song.”
He said they helped him get down to the heart of it, and that the feeling went straight through his arm and into his hands.
A little of the pain
His interview with People about “My Son” happened to fall on the fourth anniversary of Troy Gentry’s death. He admitted the song had been hard at first. But he said that, for some reason, it eased a little of the pain he had been carrying around for a long time.
“My Son” played over the end credits of Old Henry and became track three on Ain’t No Closing Me Down, the solo debut Eddie released on October 29, 2021. Right before it on the album sits “Alive and Well,” a song about getting back up after losing two sons and a best friend. Eddie said working on the record helped heal some of his heart, and he thanked his sons and T-Roy for that.
He has kept singing it. A stripped-down acoustic version of “My Son” later appeared on his Home Run EP.