Early on a fall evening - Election Night - Joey Martin and husband Rory Feek are savoring their first night home in some time at their farm south of Nashville following a whirlwind radio tour in support of their debut Sugar Hill release "The Life of a Song" and the single from it, "Cheater Cheater," the song that sealed the deal for them as audience favorites on CMT's American Idol spin-off Can You Duet? this past spring where they finished third.

Though backed by a sterling cast and produced on the album by Carl Jackson, they continue to perform as a duet. "We're just acoustic right now, " Martin says, "We just have one guitar and two voices. It's a lot of fun and, for the most part, it's working out great, it's impactful that way, and people usually pay real close attention because there's not a lot of music going on as far as instrumentation. It's just a guitar and voices. It's been fun just to carry it on the road and, just off the cuff, bring out a song that we hadn't thought about in a long time that maybe Rory wrote or that we collaborate on and just wing it a lot of the time."

Although new to the national audience, neither were complete unknowns on the Nashville scene prior to the CMT experience. A native of Alexandria, Ind., Martin, 33, grew up singing professionally with her parents Jack and June, high school sweethearts who married on his return from Vietnam.

"We were kind of like The Judds, mom would sing harmony with me and some leads, and I knew at a really young age that's what I wanted to do." She pauses for emphasis. "And that's all I wanted to do, be a singer and move people, or try to anyway. I grew up listening to Dolly (Parton) and Patty (Loveless), and later on in life, Emmylou Harris."

Arriving in Nashville a few years after high school, she made ends meet as a veterinary technician, working with her other obsession - horses - and tried to break into the Music City circle, recording an album for Sony in 2001 that, by her own admission, "nothing really came of (it)."

Raised in Atchison, Kan. in the northeast corner of the state, Feek, 43, says his father, Robert, was a railroad worker who moonlighted as a country singer. His real dream," Feek recalls, "was music and country music in particular, and that was his passion. So, from the time I was a little boy that was all he loved to do in his spare time was sing. He used to, when I was very, very young, like play in clubs and stuff like that, and my uncle had a band...but my dad, especially played just in his bedroom, singing Merle Haggard songs and Jim Reeves and Hank Thompson, things like that."

At the age of about 15, Feek taught himself to play guitar and began filling up 90-minute cassettes with songs taped off the radio, which he would meticulously transcribe. "I'd write every lyric out and figure out what the chords were...I think that's how I ended up writing songs, was when you're breaking all those songs down and you're writing the lyrics out with a pencil and a piece of paper you start looking at how it goes together, and it makes you start doing the same thing. That first year I started playing I was writing songs already, and that ended up being what I would consider my real gift."

After a stint in the Marine Corps as an avionics technician, that gift eventually led him to Nashville in the mid-'90s where he quickly landed a job working for the late, iconic songwriter Harlan Howard. "It was all I could hope that it would be. I'm one of those guys that I've always been drawn to the legends and to the people who have blazed this trail long before I was even born, and so when I got the chance to meet Harlan...I was thrilled, but even more so when I got to write for him and be in his company for five years and sort of study under him. He was a master craftsman at what we do, and he had a lot of wisdom not just for songwriting, but for life too. In that part of his life, he was always sharing it with me and everyone else around him. It was just an extraordinary time, and I think it's one of the things that's made me a much better writer."

Following Howard's passing in 2002, Rory wrote for Clint Black for a time before co-founding Giantslayer Publishing with friend and partner Tim Johnson. By the time the CMT show rolled around, he'd become a known quantity by having penned a healthy list of hits for the Music City elite, including chart toppers for Clay Walker ("The Chain of Love"), Collin Raye ("Someone You Used To Know") and Blake Shelton ("Some Beach").

On his own, with two young daughters to care for, Feek became a regular at the various songwriter sessions and open mikes in Nashville. At the venerable Bluebird CafŽ one night, Martin recalls, she first set eyes on him.

"(It) was funny, I didn't know there were songwriter nights, I didn't know there were songwriters. I just figured the artists who sing the songs wrote them themselves, I was just real na•ve. But I went to the Bluebird one night, and Rory was playing in the round, and I didn't know anything about him...I just knew that he sang a song that was fixin' to be a single for Clay Walker called 'Chain of Love.' Every song that he would sing, everything that he talked about, the way he held himself, just everything, I fell in love with. I said to myself, 'That's the kind of man I'm gonna marry'."

She pauses a moment to laugh and continues, "A few songs later he introduced his daughters that were with him that night, and I was pretty bummed out. I said to myself, 'All the good ones are gone' because I just assumed he was married because he had his little girls with him that night. I just remembered everything about him, from what he wore and what he sang about, and his name. He wore overalls...and that was kind of his signature trademark. A couple of years went by, and I went to another songwriter's night...and found out he was playing. I just had to go to see if all those feelings that I had before still existed. By this time, I knew that he wasn't married, that he moved to Nashville with his two girls...and he raised them all by himself, and that just spoke to me at such a deeper level and made me fall in love with him more, knowing that."

Now married more than six years, the CMT show came as something of an unexpected bonus for them, Martin says. "We never really thought about us being a duo, I continued to try to go on and be a solo artist. We recorded an independent record ("Strong Enough To Cry") on myself, Rory produced it and wrote for it. That never really came out in stores, nothing with radio. Now, here we are, and the TV show came about, and we ended up getting a record deal after that and have an album out and a single on the radio. It's hard to believe."

The relationship with independent Sugar Hill, a recent transplant to Nashville from North Carolina after a quarter-century as a primarily bluegrass label, seems to be a good fit. Having previously expressed disdain for what he terms the "beauty contest" in the town, Feek's not backing down.

"I don't think (that's) any less true today than it was (when I first came), except that I don't think all the majors control all the cards anymore. I think that there are people and companies and opportunities being created for people to slip in from all different ways. I think it's just a shame that it's that way. We know that here in Nashville there are tons of people that are the best songwriters and also fabulous emoters of songs, fabulous singers who aren't the most beautiful, but they're real, and they're authentic, and yet they're overlooked every day. And I think it's a tragedy."

"The Life of a Song" is replete with the sort of hard-edged traditional country fare, leavened by Martin's rich, sweet voice, that won raves on "Can You Duet?" "Heart of the Wood" tells the story of building a family home from the trees in the front yard. "Play the Song" expresses Feek's "frustration" at the Music Row "assembly line" approach, and he laughs as he recalls that when he first turned the song in to his publisher, "you could hear crickets." The disc includes their rendition of "Free Bird," which Martin says evolved from her audition for a movie part she didn't get, but when they hit CMT turned judge Naomi Judd into a mentor and fan.

The centerpiece though, of course, is the single, "Cheater Cheater" for which both Martin and Feek share writer credits with Kristy Osmunson and Wynn Varble. Where Dolly Parton's "Jolene" is about begging the other woman to go away, Feek says this song is the real world, where the woman wronged tells them both to take a hike.

"The majority of how I like to write a song is sort of from a first line, not knowing necessarily what the title's gonna be, and definitely not knowing where the song's gonna go or what the story's gonna say - letting the song tell us. And (this) was one of those, just 'Cheater, cheater, where'd you meet her? Down at Ernie's Bar', and the story was unfolding. "

Referring to the tune's killer "hook" lyric, Feek wryly acknowledges the song is "not politically correct." "When that song told us, 'Did you think I wouldn't know? Where'd you meet that no-good white trash ho'?', I was laughing just like everybody else, I was knocked out...I brought it home to Joey, and I thought it was hilarious. She didn't think it was hilarious, she thought it was a smash. It's what everyone's thinking. It's what every girl would say. Even Joey, she's very strong in her faith, in her marriage, in her morals and everything else, but she's human and she gets riled up, and that's what she would say in that moment, and I think that's why people are reacting to it. We were doing a show in Sacramento three nights ago, and it was absolute insanity, people were screaming it back to us, huge clubs filled with people, and it was the first time we had experienced it. But Joey had already known it from the first time she heard it in the house here, she knew that was gonna happen."

Success, Feek concludes, is a heck of a lot of fun. "We're not kidding when we say we're in awe of it all, especially to be together as a husband and wife, that's a pretty extraordinary opportunity, and we're having a great time, and we're getting a chance to go out and promote music that we believe in."