Charlie Louvin keeps on doing his thing

Charlie Louvin keeps on doing his thing


Published by Peter Cooper on September 9, 2010



Click to see a decades-spanning gallery of Charlie Louvin photos (this

image: Alan Messer).



Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Louvin has been married almost 61 years. And his wife, Betty,
isn’t much of a slack-cutter.

“You smoke another cigarette, Charlie, you ought to be made to chew it,” she said to her husband,
balancing her love and sympathy over Charlie’s pancreatic cancer with a stern approach to well being.

For his part, Charlie, 83, pronounced himself “as nervous as a pregnant fox in a forest fire” and thus
in want of a smoke, but decided against lighting up in his Wartrace home. Instead, he chose to drink
a lemon/lime flavored Sprite Zero, and to ruminate on art and mortality.

“In my world, you are worthless if you can’t continue,” said the singer, who’ll continue on Friday,
Sept. 10 with an Americana Music Festival showcase at The Rutledge. “Show business is all I really
know how to do, and I would like for it to be the last thing I do.”

Louvin remembers two performers who died “while doing their thing” in his lifetime: Onie Wheeler,
who died on the Grand Ole Opry stage, and Grandpa Jones, who suffered a fatal stroke just after
coming off the Opry stage.

“Some idiot stopped him in the hall, wanting an autograph,” Louvin said of Jones. “‘It looks like I’ve
hit a snag,’ were the last words he said, trying to be funny. I’m not that tough, but I can work at it.”

In truth, Louvin is plenty tough. He has survived the music industry for more than a half-century, at
first performing as half of The Louvin Brothers and, since 1963, as a solo act. His Hall of Fame
membership is testament both to his string of Louvin Brothers hits and to his place as a primary
influence on fellow Country Hall of Famer Emmylou Harris, on her mentor, Gram Parsons, and on
generations of musicians who tend to fall in the rootsy “Americana” camp.

The singer recorded his latest album, Hickory Wind: Live at the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull, with his
band in Waycross, Ga., and it documents Louvin’s first performance of a Parsons-penned song. He’ll
revive that song — the plaintive “Hickory Wind” — at Friday’s Rutledge show.

“I’m sorry that I personally never got to meet Gram Parsons,” Louvin said. “Emmylou tells me that
when Gram was trying to teach her harmony, he’d say, ‘Come over here, I’ve got a Louvin Brothers
record.’ He and she both have helped the Louvin catalog, and he’s still very well remembered. I don’t
know or want to know what any of his habits were, but he died awful young.”

Parsons died in 1973 at age 26, a victim of the usual dangerous habits. His albums were not
commercial successes, but they offered an intriguing mix of old-school country and new-world
sensibilities that Parsons called “Cosmic American Music.”

In the years since his passing, Parsons’ recordings have garnered more attention than they received
in his lifetime, and his love of the Louvin Brothers, George Jones and other traditional country artists
has been passed to new generations. And Harris, who broke into the business as Parsons’ duet
partner, has introduced millions of listeners to the songs of Charlie and Ira Louvin with her
recordings. Charlie Louvin is well acquainted with Harris (she’ll sing with him Friday), but he knows
Parsons only through stories and old records.

“Every rock group he worked with, he conned ’em into recording Louvin songs,” Louvin said. “He was
a Louvin freak. I hate for someone to speak well of you, and before you get to meet them and shake
hands and thank them, they’re gone.”

Louvin’s brother, Ira, also died young, at 41. His alcohol-ravaged life ended in a 1965 car accident.
The duo had already broken up by then, with Charlie forging ahead with hit songs including “I Don’t
Love You Anymore.” The breakup was difficult, though not nearly so difficult as Ira’s death. And
Charlie was not comforted by friends and fans who surmised that Ira Louvin must have been called
to Heaven because the Lord needed a tenor singer for his angel choir.

“I imagine God could teach us to sing whatever part he wants us to sing,” Charlie said.

The Louvin Brothers’ harmony style came quite naturally, as did the songwriting.

“I was the idea man,” Charlie said. “It was my pleasant duty to write down anything that sounded
like it could be made into a song. Ira would finish the songs really fast. Many times, he’d come into
my house and say, ‘Get your guitar, I’ve got this song finished.’ I wouldn’t even know what tune he’s
put to it, but he’d say, ‘It’s in D,’ and when he kicked it off I could tell where he was going with the
melody. I’d do the melody and he’d do the harmony, and if I didn’t do it right the first time, many
times he’d throw it in the trash can. He was as close as you could get to a perfectionist, which is a
curse in this world. He wanted to be perfect, but since nobody ever has been, he tortured himself.”

Charlie doesn’t fret about perfection, but he has worried about reception in recent years, when he’s
ventured from the Grand Ole Opry to major rock ’n’ roll stages. He’s shared bills with Cheap Trick,
Cake, Lucinda Williams and others, finding that his worries were unfounded.

“I asked myself a thousand times, what I was going to do if they introduced me and people in the
audience say, ‘Hey, get that redneck (junk) out of here, we came to hear rock,’” Louvin said. “But
that didn’t happen. Really, it came out beautiful. We’re cursed with categorizing everything. We’ve
got to give it a name, instead of just calling it ‘music.’ But people don’t look at it as being different if
it’s good.”


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