Friends + Collaborators Share Memories

Joey Feek, one-half of husband and wife duo Joey and Rory, died on March 4, 2016. She was just 40 years old.

She was survived by her husband and duo partner, Rory Feek, her then 2-year-old daughter Indiana, two step-daughters and a large and loving cohort of extended family and friends. To those who were closest to the singer, and to Joey and Rory’s passionate fan base, her absence still looms large today.

Read More: Joey Feek Dead at 40 After Cancer Battle

To mark the 10th anniversary of her death, some of those family members, friends and musical collaborators shared their favorite memories of Joey with Taste of Country. Keep reading for a look back at her remarkable life in music, from the perspective of people who knew her best.

Who Was Joey Feek?

Joey Feek, née Joey Marie Martin, was born on Sept. 9, 1975, in Indiana. She had three older sisters — Jody, Julie and Jessie — and a younger brother named Justin, who died in a car accident when they were teens.

Her sister Julie remembers Joey as a kid with a passion for horses and country music, who grew up dreaming of pursuing music in Nashville. Julie says the family listened to country music “all the time,” and that their mother sang and their dad played guitar.

Joey moved to Nashville in 2002. She didn’t find much success as a solo artist at first, signing a major label deal but never releasing an album as part of that contract. In the meantime, she worked for an equestrian veterinarian. There, she met songwriter Sandy Lawrence, who would later go on to write the Joey + Rory song “When I’m Gone.”

“She was so smart, funny and hardworking, with a down-to-earth beauty inside and out,” Lawrence tells Taste of Country. “She had a black Dodge truck, a knife in her pocket, and always her dog Rufus by her side.”

Joey met her future husband, Rory Feek, at a songwriters night.

The couple had their first date in June 2002 and married four months later, and she put her music career on the back burner to help him raise his daughters, Heidi and Hopie. But she returned to the spotlight as part of a duo with Rory in 2008, when they competed and eventually placed third on the televised singing competition Can You Duet.

How Did Joey + Rory End Up On Can You Duet?

John Bohlinger, who was the musical director of Nashville Star in the mid-2000s, helped place the couple on Can You Duet after Rory asked him to help Joey get an audition on Nashville Star.

“We met out at [Marcy Jo’s, a restaurant Joey co-owned with Rory’s sister Marcy Gary], and I suggested that Joey going on Nashville Star solo would be a tough fight,” Bohlinger tells Taste of Country. “She’d be lumped in with all these other girls, and just the nature of reality TV, people would not get to see the real her.”

But he did think that the Feek’s personalities and dynamic together had potential on the then-new duo-based show.

“I set up a private audition, and I told Joey to come with a basket of biscuits for the producers, which she did. And the two of them charmed everybody in the room, and then the rest of America,” he continues.

Joey’s family traveled to see her on the show all the way from Indiana. Julie Martin recalls packing her three small children, plus her sister Jessie’s two kids, into a car to come watch her performances.

On the heels of the show, Joey and Rory released their debut album The Life of a Song, which included the Top 40 hit “Cheater, Cheater.” They put out multiple albums over the following years, including both country and faith-based projects. Their final album, Hymns That Are Important to Us, arrived in 2016 and placed at No. 1 on the Billboard US Country Albums chart.

What Were Joey Feek’s Favorite Joey and Rory Songs to Sing?

Zamboldi says it’s tough to pick Joey’s favorite out of Joey and Rory’s large catalog of songs, but that she loved to sing hymns, and the song “That’s Important To Me” held a special place in Joey’s heart. Its lyrics tell the story of her life.

Another special song is “When I’m Gone,” which Sandy Lawrence wrote as she grieved the death of her mother. Rory learned about the song first, and eventually, Joey and Rory decided to cut it together.

“I remember Joey expressing that while she loved the song, she didn’t think she had the vocal range. Rory and I were both quick to tell her she did,” Lawrence recounts. They wound up filming the music video from the perspective of Rory as a grieving widower, and Joey as his late wife. At the time, she hadn’t yet been diagnosed with cancer.

“God works in mysterious ways, as they say,” Lawrence adds.

Food + Eating Well Was Important to Joey Feek

When Taste of Country asked friends and family members to share personal memories of Joey Feek, many of them returned anecdotes that had to do with food.

“That was a big thing to her, was to feed her family well,” Zamboldi says.

McCauley remembers how Feek showed her how to shake pears from the trees, then can them or cook them into sauce — all while holding her baby daughter, Indiana.

Bill Anderson recalled the day they wrote their duet “Whisper” at the Feek home. He and Rory went upstairs to start writing, while Joey said she was heading out to the garden to pick tomatoes for soup.

“I thought she was gonna can it or put it away for a later time,” Anderson recounts. “About one o’clock she came up in the writing room and said, ‘Lunch is ready.’ Lo and behold, she had made soup with those tomatoes from that morning…I never had soup that fresh in my life.”

After lunch, he says, Joey came upstairs to see what they had been working on. She started adding her own ideas, and pretty soon, they’d expanded their song with a part for her to sing, too.

Joey Feek Shared Her Authentic Self With the World

Though they never saw major country radio chart success, Joey + Rory amassed a devoted fan base thanks in part to their open, welcoming style of interacting with fans at shows.

“They held those concerts out there at the farm and opened up their whole world to the fans,” remembers Bill Anderson, a longtime friend of the Feeks who collaborated with them on a song called “Whisper.” “Not everybody’s able to do that, and they did a wonderful job of it.”

They also shared large parts of their life with the world via Rory Feek’s blog This Life I Live, which he began in 2014 as the couple prepared to welcome a baby and decided to take a break from the spotlight and focus on their family.

Read More: 5 Unforgettable Joey and Rory Songs

The family’s commitment to documenting their life meant that fans felt especially close to the Feeks. Julie Zamboldi, who was one of Joey’s best friends, says that it was her authenticity that captured so many people’s hearts. “I really think that people had a good essence of who she was,” she explains.

“She didn’t watch TV. She just made the most of her day,” Zamboldi continues. “She quilted. She sang. She canned. She did stuff in the kitchen. She touched a lot of people…I think because she did so many things, she was able to touch more lives.”

Zamboldi started out as a fan of Joey and Rory, before she and Joey became friends. The first time they met, they had an instant bond, and Zamboldi says they both cried during that conversation.

She says that Joey lived life with intention, and she used that word a lot when talking about how she wanted to structure her days. Another musical friend, singer-songwriter Mandy McCauley, says that her authenticity made Feek a rare breed in the music business.

“She was incredibly authentic and real. In the midst of an industry with a bunch of fake people…she was genuinely who she was and she never shied away from that,” McCauley remembers.

Motherhood Meant Everything to Joey Feek

Joey had a motherhood experience with Rory’s stepdaughters Heidi and Hopie, but she chose to wait until a little later in life to welcome baby Indiana: She was 38 when Indiana was born.

“She embraced it like she did everything,” Zomboldi remembers. “Indiana was never more loved than by Joey. And Indiana would watch her just the way fans would. Indiana was intrigued with her as well. Their bond was really strong.”

“I wish she had more time being a mom,” she continues. “But I’m glad she had that. And she had it with Heidi and Hopie as well.”

Joey Feek’s Later Years + Cancer Battle

In their blog — plus many video posts uploaded to YouTube, and Rory’s book This Life I Live — the couple shared much of their life. Rory wrote about Indiana’s Down Syndrome diagnosis, and publicly revealed his wife’s diagnosis of cervical cancer just four months after their daughter was born.

Read More: Joey and Rory’s Joey Feek Undergoes Cancer Surgery

The couple continued to share their cancer journey with fans every step of the way, including a year of remission followed by an aggressive recurrence of the disease. In October 2015, they told fans that Feek’s cancer was terminal, and that they were stopping treatment in order to focus on quality of life for the time she had left.

Early on in their friendship, Zomboldi says Joey was a pillar of strength while Zomboldi watched two other friends battle and, eventually, die from cancer. When Joey was diagnosed, Zomboldi felt like it was her turn to be there for her friend.

Read More: 40 Country Singers Who Died Too Soon

When Joey decided to shave her head while undergoing chemotherapy, Zomboldi — along with Joey’s sisters, father and niece — also shaved theirs in solidarity.

“Her hair meant a lot to her,” Zomboldi recalls, “so when she wanted to shave it, I think that night or the next night, I thought, ‘This would be so easy for me to do.’ I was ready for her to kind of push back a little bit, but she didn’t at all.”

Feek entered hospice care and was able to celebrate Indiana’s second birthday on Feb. 17, 2016. She died weeks later, on March 4, and was buried in the Feek family cemetery on their farm in Tennessee.

Joey Feek Lives On In The Hearts Of Those Who Loved Her

For those closest to Joey, her memory lives on — and the pain of her absence will never fade away. Without exception, everyone Taste of Country spoke to for this story emphasized how blessed they felt to have known Joey during her life.

In a full-circle moment, as the 10th anniversary of Joey’s death approaches, her sister Julie told Taste of Country that her family was preparing to bring Joey’s horse Ria home to their farm for her daughter to ride.

“She’ll be able to show Ria at our local little county fair, which is something that Joey would just be so excited about,” Julie tells Taste of Country. “And when Indy can visit, we’ll put her on Ria because she’ll be well-trained by then.”

Sandy Lawrence says that in “When I’m Gone” — the song she wrote about her mother’s death, which Joey and Rory wound up recording — there’s a lyric about “morning glorious blue skies.”

“Joey knew I wasn’t religious, but we talked about ‘the God things,'” Lawrence says. “…I love morning glories, and I meant to plant some, but never got around to it. The year after Joey’s death they showed up in my garden, right around her birthday. I gave some seeds from them to a mutual friend of Joey’s and mine — same thing, the first bloom came on Sept. 9, Joey’s birthday.”

“The thing I miss most about Joey…is just having that best friend that you talk about dumb things with,” Julie Zamboldi says, emotion in her voice. “The mundane conversations. The things that maybe you don’t tell your husband, you don’t tell your sisters, you don’t tell your family…I miss that with her.”

Mandy McCauley has a physical item in her house to remind her of her late friend.

“I have a pair of boots that she gave me before she died, that she wanted me to wear, but they don’t fit very well,” she recounts. “I put ’em on my mantle in our living room and I’m thinking about putting a plaque on it that says, ‘No one can ever fill these boots.'”