Loss of a Country Music Legend

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Every now and then a country music song will come along that even the people who don’t listen to country music know. Now, they may not like it, but they at least know the song. In this case, the song is “Flowers on the Wall.” Harold Reid, one of the two actual brothers in the Statler Brothers, died yesterday (4/24) after years of kidney failure issues. The now-defunct Statler Tissue Company in Maine will live on forever, thanks to the Statler Brothers. That’s where they got their name from: a box of Statler tissues in a motel room. Harold Reid was the bass singer and major comedian of the band. His alter-ego, Lester “Roadhog” Moran, was a riot as they spoofed the small-town live radio shows of yesteryear. They even recorded a couple of albums as “Lester ‘Roadhog’ Moran and the Cadillac Cowboys.” As any of our professional or semi-professional musicians here will tell you, it is dang near impossible to deliberately sing and play off-key and out of meter. Even those of us who can’t sing or play TRY. So, to hear these masters of harmony singing horribly was painfully (deliberately so) funny. Roadhog’s MC commentary was even funnier. In 2003, following a career that stretched back to the early 60s when they performed strictly as a gospel quartet, the Statler Brothers called it a career. For some inexplicable reason it took until 2008 for them to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He is the second of the Statler Brothers to pass away. Original tenor Lew DeWitt left the band in the early 80s because of Crohn’s disease and died from complications in 1990. Harold Reid was 80. Here’s that big crossover hit (that even won a “best contemporary/‘rock and roll’ Grammy in 1965 [I’m not kidding]):