It’s been seven years since Randy Travis suffered a stroke. The singer was hospitalized in July of 2013 with viral cardiomyopathy, which resulted in a stroke three days later. Randy’s future was bleak when he was finally released from the hospital the following November, but his wife, Mary says he continues to impress everyone with his improvements.

“When we left the hospital in November 2013, they said, ‘Well, you know, he’s going to be bedridden the rest of his life. And you will be in and out of hospitals the rest of his life. So this is a huge task that you’re taking on,'” Mary recalled to Rolling Stone. “I said, ‘I don’t mind that… and I don’t believe it.’ He got to the point where he pretty much shut down as far as going through the rehab because it does get tedious.

“When there’s that much damage done, you take tiny baby steps,” she continued. “There are plateaus — you’ll see a spurt of improvement, then it’ll flatline for a while and you’re just kind of at a plateau, and then you’ll see another improvement and every little thing is such a huge thing.”

Three years after his stroke, Randy was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Although his speech was largely affected by his stroke, Randy surprised everyone by singing “Amazing Grace” during his acceptance speech.

“Randy and I were on the road, and we just practiced ‘Amazing Grace’ over and over and over,” Mary recalled. “We were still having a hard time with long sentences or anything else because of the aphasia. But that was just one of those songs that he grasped. When I handed the microphone over to him, I wasn’t sure how’d it go, but we agreed that’s what we wanted to do. And we hadn’t told anybody, not even the Hall of Fame people. So nobody knew it was going to happen.

“We had a group of people there from Texas and one of them said, ‘Mary has lost her mind. What is she doing? I can’t believe she’s doing this, she’s really putting him on the spot,'” she recounted. “Then the next thing I did is I looked over at Charlie Daniels and he had a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth, crying and blowing his nose. Everybody in the place was crying. It was a beautiful thing.”

Randy released his memoir, Forever and Ever, Amen: A Memoir of Music, Faith and Braving the Storms of Life, which was co-written with New York Times best-selling author Ken Abraham, in 2019. The book was recently named the Best Country Music Book of All Time, according to Book Authority. Purchase the book at Amazon.