The Story Behind Robert Earl Keen’s ‘Feelin’ Good Again’

Earlier this year Robert Earl Keen was inducted into The Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the World’s Largest Honky-Tonk, Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth, Texas.

The legendary Texan recently with Rick Moore at American Songwriter, to tell the story of one of his best story songs, "Feelin' Good Again."

“Perkins," says Keen, "was this old, really tiny guy, weighed about 140 pounds, really thin … he would do the train whistle. He would just come right up to you and go, ‘WOOOO, WOOOOO!!’ very loudly. And Jimmy John was not a person in the bar, but he was one of my nine managers. He was actually from Bandera … There is no Silver City; there is a town in Texas called Quihi that’s about 10 miles down the road. So I used Silver City because Quihi didn’t really work in the song. And now, Kathleen, the love interest in the story coming down the stairs, is my wife because occasionally she would wake up and figure, oh he’s not here, he must be at Arkey’s. And she would come down and see me and we would all sit and drink. And sometimes Arkey would lock the door and we would keep going after hours and go as long as we wanted to.”

Check out the full story behind "Feelin' Good Again" right here.