Country Singer Rory Feek Remarries 8 Years After Wife And Musical Partner’s Death
Nearly a decade after experiencing personal tragedy, country musician Rory Feek is celebrating the start of a new life chapter.
Last week, Feek confirmed that he married Rebecca, his daughter Indiana’s teacher, in a Montana ceremony on July 14. The wedding came roughly eight years after the death of his first wife and longtime musical partner, Joey Feek.
A Grammy winner for his 2017 album, “Hymns,” Feek wrote at length about his wedding in a blog titled “the wedding singer” that was posted to his personal website Friday.
And though he’d addressed his romance with Rebecca previously, he said he was initially hesitant to do so with Indiana present, given that the 10-year-old knew his partner as “as ‘Miss Rebecca,’ her schoolteacher and our friend.”
“Her love for her Mama is so great and so big in her life,” Feek explained. “Neither Rebecca or I wanted to hurt that in any way. And so we just waited and watched to see if it might ever occur to Indiana that Rebecca could be more than just a friend to her Papa, and to her.”
By March, however, Indiana appeared to have figured things out, and even urged Rebecca directly to “marry Papa.” That same day, she told her father, “My Mama’s been gone a long time. And if she marries you, maybe she could be my new mother...”
“Needless to say, as I wiped away some tears, I told her I thought that was a wonderful idea,” Feek wrote.
Feek was married to Joey, who is Indiana’s mother, from 2002 until her 2016 death of cervical cancer. As the country-bluegrass duo Joey + Rory, the couple released seven studio albums, including 2012’s “His and Hers” and 2013’s “Made to Last.”
Feek, who has two other daughters from his first marriage to Tamara Gilmer, has yet to collaborate with his new wife on music. However, as he wrote in his blog, he did perform a new song, “I Do,” dedicated to Rebecca at the wedding.
The song “represents the moment when a beautiful past meets an even more beautiful present,” he noted. By far the wedding’s most tender moment was “when Indiana was given the gift of having a Mama in her life again” and “Rebecca was given the gift of being a mother.”
“And we became a family,” he wrote.