This is an I-Heart podcast.

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 turned 17, 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 to myself,

this will be great. We'll grow up together, he told a local reporter in Nashville in 2014,

laughing at his naivete. It would take Barker a long time to learn that fatherhood entails more,

much more than being a friend to a son.

More than 16 years, to be precise, when his son reached an age when 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. I had to get on him

one night and he had driven his car past where he was supposed to drive his car both ways,

everything. All the rules were 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

went on was a school night so he finally went to bed and after he went to bed I

was kind of like it just it just dawned on me that it was my time to be the dad and

so that was kind of a revelation to me at that point in our lives growing up

together it turns out it wasn't just Barker's son who had a hard time sleeping that night.

The father was still trying to process what had happened to him.

...