The Story of How George Strait's "Love Without End, Amen" Came to Be

On this episode of Our American Stories, songwriter Aaron Barker tells the story of a life-altering event in his life as a father that birthed one of country music's greatest songs. An event that brought him to his knees to pray. And play his guitar.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue here with our American stories. And up
next a story about a song, the story of how
George Strait's Love Without end Amen came to be. Songwriter
Aaron Barker's son was born just two weeks after he

(00:30):
turned seventeen, but he wasn't filled with dread at the
prospect of being a father at such a young age.
Barker's own father, it turns out, wasn't present in his life.
What better way to make up for that absence, he figured,
than to have a boy, a buddy of his own.
I was with him in the hospital, and I thought

(00:51):
to myself, this will be great. We'll grow up together,
he told a local reporter in Nashville in twenty fourteen,
laughing at his naivete It would take Barker a long
time to learn that fatherhood entails more, much more than
being a friend to his son. More than sixteen years,
to be precise, when his son reached an age when

(01:13):
boys test their father's boundaries patience and love. Here is
Barker talking about this very thing at a songwriter's event
in Huntsville, Alabama.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I had to get on him one night, and he
had driven his car passed where he was supposed to
drive his car both ways. Everything all the rolls are
out the window. So anyway, I had to set him
down and have this talk with him, and I got
pretty hot and heavy with it, and when on it
was a school night, so he finally went to bed,
and after he went to bed, I was kind of like,
it just dawned on me that it was my time

(01:47):
to be the dad. And so that was kind of
a revelation to me at that point in our lives
growing up together.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
It turns out it wasn't just Barker's son who had
a hard time sleeping that night. The father. It was
still trying to process what had happened to him. He
had his own doubts about how he'd handled things, not
certain he'd administered the proper dosage of discipline to his son.
No father ever is so Aaron Barker did with a
songwriter who happens to be a Christian would do let's

(02:19):
take a listen.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
So I sitting there kind of doing what I do.
My guitar has always been like my therapist, so I
kind of call it getting all my knees and playing.
It's somewhere between praying and playing. Songs and working on stuff,
but looking for answers that way. And so I was
doing that. I was getting all my knees and playing.
And the question I had was, how can you be

(02:41):
that mad at somebody and still love him that much?
Where does that come from? You know? And this song
is the answer I got that night. It was about
four in the morning. And I also had a co
writer on this, It was God. That's when I learned
God to write someone lets me put my name on him.
He didn't even take publishing on it.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
The answer to that question he was asking God and
to which God had an answer, turned out to be
the song Love Without end Amen, which soon wound up
in country legend George Strait's Capable Hands. The rest was history.
The song spent five weeks at number one on what
is now called the Hot Country charts in April of

(03:24):
nineteen ninety, giving straight his first multi week number one song.
His prior number one songs, all eighteen of them, had
spent only a week at the top of the charts.
Why did the song resonate with so many music lovers
for so long and why does it still resonate today?
Barker had his own explanations, one that had less to

(03:45):
do with earthly concerns and more to do with those
of an eternal variety. The song tells the story of
a trouble making son who sent home from school one
day for fighting, only to find a father who, before
disciplining his boy, shares some secret words his own father
had shared with him when he'd been in trouble. In

(04:06):
the second verse, the narrator has himself become a father
and passes along the very same secret words his father
had shared with him on a night his own son
tested some boundaries. In the third and magnificent final verse,
the narrator dreams that he's died and he's standing outside
Heaven's gate. It is followed by the final chorus, repeated

(04:29):
for a third time, but now imbued with a spiritual dimension,
a deeply Christian dimension that emphasizes God's unconditional love for
all of his sons and daughter. Hears Barker himself singing
that third verse and final chorus.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Left and dream bad dance to that Lando's bird A
Gates suddenly realized the most beisum study.

Speaker 4 (05:01):
They all have things up, and they'll never hear me.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
It's somewhere from the other side. I heard these words.
Let's up to tell you a secret about the words.

Speaker 4 (05:20):
You see have had that, he says, You see that
is the longest love their children and every now thing.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
It's a love with that, and.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
It's a love with that.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Look all right, brow, the fathers out there doing our
best to love our children were thankful. Barker chose to
memorialize his deepest struggles and questions that fateful night. His
story is the story of all of us who carry
the name of Father with pride, all of us who

(06:14):
believe that being a good father is the world's most
important work. All of us who believe that in loving
our children unconditionally, we come close to being godlike here
on earth. It's not too late to join the best
club in America, the Father's Club, and experience love, unconditional,
love that never ends. The story of how George Strait's

(06:37):
Love without end Amen came to be the story of
fatherhood and so much more. Here on our American Stories,

(07:32):
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