Stater brotherscom digital deals3/24/2024 ![]() ![]() Both albums include Biblical readings at the beginning of almost every track, lest anyone be tempted to listen to the lovely harmonies without appropriate piety. ![]() That was their only concession to commercialism, though. ![]() The group released this classic hymn as a single to promote a pair of gospel albums based on the Old and New Testament respectively. Unlike many of their peers, though, they continued recording religious songs even after finding secular success. Gospel music is where the Statler Brothers started. Putting aside the fact that the Statlers themselves had plenty of dalliances with pop trends, it’s cuter and more effective than most similar complaints. None of them, though, wrote a line as clean as, “They’ve traded in the saddle and they all try to straddle the road that will take ‘em to the top” – except the Statler Brothers, of course, who bust out all available Appalachian trappings to prove their point on this 10th Anniversary track. People have been lamenting the decountrification of country music since before it was called country music. The song was popular enough that the Statler Brothers included it in their brief set at Folsom Prison during Johnny Cash’s legendary live recording. 10 on Billboard’s country chart by riffing on an already-established pun (one that has reached into the present day, perhaps with help from the Statlers). One of the more ubiquitous of the Statlers’ novelty tunes, this Curly Putman and Bobby Braddock tune reached No. “You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith, Too” (1967) The song solidified the band’s late 70s hot streak, spending two weeks at No. “If I’d only been more open and understood her ways,” they sang – words that plenty of women have certainly wished plenty of men would say to them in conversation, and here they were getting them in plaintive harmony. The first of ten songs written for the band by Harold Reid’s daughter Kim, “Who Am I To Say” expresses a more reflective kind of regret than typically gets expressed in song. Here, it’s presented unpretentiously, within a fairly standard pop-country arrangement where the nuance of Don Reid’s poetry could be easy to miss. There’s impressive precision in the lyrics, the kind of sensitivity that the Statlers’ rapidly ascending singer-songwriter peers on the outlaw side of country would wear on their sleeves. It is, simply, two minutes and 42 seconds of description of a week in the life of an average secretary. This quietly tragic character study is one of the more unlikely singles in the Statler Brothers’ catalog. It’s fun and distinctive, a gendered lament that never devolves into unrepentant sexism and would sound great in any contemporary honky tonk. Yet a weird streak runs through much of their work, as in this sort-of nonsense song about women and their idiosyncrasies penned by the only actual brothers in the Statlers, Don and Harold. The Statlers touted their ability to heed country convention, exemplifying what they saw as a long-lost reverence for the genre’s tradition and roots. (The harmonies remain constant, even if the stylistic influences don’t.)Ĭlick to load video 19. The Statler Brothers were the CMA’s Vocal Group Of The Year from 1972 to 1980, a period that didn’t even encompass their biggest chart success in the early to mid-‘80s.īelow are The Statler Brothers’ 20 best songs, from hymns to bluegrass to rock and roll. But neither of those details kept them from turning their particular brand of gospel-tinged and pop-informed country music into a massive, decades-long success story, one rooted in the traditional Appalachian music of their tiny hometown, Staunton, Virginia.ĭon and Harold Reid (the actual brothers), Phil Balsley, and Lew DeWitt took their name from a tissue box and never looked back, first as Johnny Cash’s longtime opening act and backing vocalists – a smart inoculation against “Flowers On the Wall” making them a one-hit-wonder – and then as one of country’s most dominant vocal groups in the 1970s and 80s. The Statler Brothers are not biological kin, and none of them are named Statler. ![]()
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