Charlie Louvin, a voice who moved country music generations, dies at 83

Charlie Louvin, a voice who moved
country music generations, dies at 83


Posted on January 26, 2011 by Peter Cooper



Click to see a gallery of Charlie Louvin photos (this image: Alan Messer).




Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Louvin, a star of the Grand Ole Opry for more than a half century,
died early Wednesday morning at his home in Wartrace, Tenn. He was 83 and suffered from
pancreatic cancer.

From the late 1940s through the early ’60s, Mr. Louvin and his brother Ira, performing as The Louvin
Brothers, revived country music’s emotional, full-throated harmony tradition. They notched 10 top-20
Billboard country hits with classics such as “When I Stop Dreaming,” “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My
Baby” and “My Baby’s Gone,” part of a body of work that would later inspire artists including
Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Dolly Parton.

After the brothers disbanded, Mr. Louvin forged a solo career that included 16 Billboard Top 40
country hits in the ’60s. And in the new century, he rose yet again, receiving two Grammy
nominations, playing the Bonnaroo rock festival and collaborating with the rock-ready likes of Cake,
Cheap Trick and Elvis Costello.

“He really changed the world of music, Charlie did,” said Harris, whose 1970s covers of Louvin
Brothers material helped revive interest in the brother duo. “I know that for me, hearing The Louvin
Brothers brought me that fierce love of harmony. And after The Louvin Brothers, Charlie kept on
going for so many years.”

Asked in 2008 about his longevity in the music business, Mr. Louvin offered advice for those who
would follow in his footsteps: “You need to smile a lot, sing your butt off and shake every hand that’s
stuck in front of you.”

Mr. Louvin adhered to that philosophy throughout his career. In the 1940s, one teenage fan
attended a Louvin Brothers show in Dyess, Ark., and Mr. Louvin took time to chat with him while
munching on soda crackers. Years later, the fan became a star himself: For much of his career,
Johnny Cash ate two soda crackers before he went onstage, in emulation of Mr. Louvin.

Ira Louvin died in 1965, but Charlie Louvin lived to receive praise and thanks from several
generations of performers. He listened as artists celebrated his influence with kind comments and
tribute albums and as musicians including Harris, Parton, Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons recorded
songs he and his brother co-wrote. He was grateful for the recognition and sought to encourage
others to show their appreciation to those who had come before.

“If you have any roses that you would like to lay in front of somebody or put in their hand, do it while
they can still smell ’em,” he said. “This deal of saying how great a guy was after he’s gone, that don’t
mean squat.”

And yet as word of his passing spread, musicians and fans couldn’t help but remark on Mr. Louvin’s
impact and import.

“Country music has lost one of its royal figures,” said fellow Opry member Marty Stuart.


From Alabama to ‘Opry’

Born Charles Ezra Loudermilk in 1927 in Section, Ala., Mr. Louvin spent most of his childhood in rural
Henager, Ala., growing up in a home with no electricity. Charlie and older brother Ira, the only boys
among seven children, impressed family and locals by harmonizing with each other. The brothers
spent hours listening to the Delmore Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys and any airing of the Grand Ole Opry.

“When I was 14, Ira moved to Chattanooga with his wife and conned my daddy to allow me to come
there and enter an amateur contest,” Mr. Louvin said in 2010. “We won the big prize, which was a
one-minute show at 4:30 a.m. over WDEF, a 1,000-watt station. My daddy was up milking the cow
and feeding the stock at that time.”

The early morning work led to a gig in Jasper, Tenn., where the brothers made $100 each on their first night.

“At the time, Ira was making $30 a week at the Peerless Woolen Mill at Rossville, Ga.,” Mr. Louvin
said. “We thought, ‘This is it, we’ve got the world by the tail.’ ”

They didn’t, though, and Mr. Louvin was drafted into the Army in 1945. When he returned from
service in 1946, the brothers began playing music together again as The Louvin Brothers (“People
tended to have trouble with ‘Loudermilk,’ ” Mr. Louvin told Charles Wolfe, author of In Close
Harmony: The Story of The Louvin Brothers). They worked steadily in Knoxville, Memphis and
Birmingham and recorded in Nashville, all the while trying to make the Grand Ole Opry. After nine
auditions, the brothers joined the Opry in January 1955 and began a run of chart success.

“I was the idea man,” Mr. Louvin said in 2010. “It was my pleasant duty to write down anything that
sounded like a song. Many times, (Ira) would finish a song, come to my house and say, ‘Get your
guitar, I’ve got this finished.’ When he kicked it off, I could tell where he was going with the melody. I
would do the melody and he’d do the harmony.”

That formula worked well for Louvin Brothers classics including “When I Stop Dreaming,” “Cash on
the Barrelhead,” “If I Could Only Win Your Love” and “You’re Learning.” While the Louvins’ early
1950s songs most often explored gospel themes, many of their hits were yearning ballads on
unrequited love. The records at times featured electric guitars and other “modern” instruments, but
the brothers’ vocal interplay was the sonic centerpiece.

The Louvins were masters of the smoothly blended, “close harmony” style of duo singing. Ira’s
creamy high tenor merged with Charlie’s lower-pitched, blanket-warm voice and created what Harris
often calls “the third voice”: one singular sound created from two.

“At a time when classic harmony singing had almost died out in country music, Charlie and Ira
brought it back, rejuvenated it, and showed how relevant it was to the very heart and soul of the
music,” Wolfe wrote.

The Louvin Brothers’ chart run lasted from 1955 to 1962. Charlie Louvin was a teetotaler, but Ira’s
heavy drinking and temper are well chronicled. In August 1963, the duo disbanded. Later, Charlie
Louvin said, “Jack Daniel’s broke up The Louvin Brothers.”

While Ira spun further out of control, Charlie Louvin scored a No. 4 hit in 1964 with “I Don’t Love You
Anymore” and a Top 10 record in 1965 with “See the Big Man Cry.”

In June of that year, Ira Louvin and his fourth wife, Anne Young, were killed in an automobile accident.

“Charlie lost his brother twice, really,” Harris said. “It had to be so hard for him to go on as a solo act
while Ira was alive, and then to have to actually lose him in the accident. And Charlie soldiered on.”


A Louvin resurgence

Though Mr. Louvin’s time as a radio voice was over by 1975, his legacy was being reborn and recast.
“The Christian Life,” a song he co-wrote with his brother, had been recorded on The Byrds’
country-rock forerunner, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, in the late 1960s, when Louvin acolyte Gram
Parsons was a member of that band. Parsons also included the Louvins’ “Cash on the Barrelhead” on
one of his early ’70s solo albums. But Parsons’ biggest boost to Mr. Louvin came when he introduced
his harmony vocalist, Emmylou Harris, to The Louvin Brothers catalog. Her voice would give new life
to Louvin Brothers songs.

Parsons died a young man in 1973, and Mr. Louvin never met him. But Mr. Louvin was pleased and
surprised to hear Harris and Herb Pedersen singing The Louvin Brothers’ “If I Could Only Win Your
Love” on the radio in 1975. That song became Harris’ first country hit.

“Without that song, who knows what my story would have been,” said Harris, now a Country Music
Hall of Famer. “It set the course for me. I remember when I first appeared on the Country Music
Awards show, they wanted me to do ‘If I Could Only Win Your Love,’ and I asked if I could sing it with Charlie.

“I think that surprised some people: When artists have been in the business a long time, sometimes
they’re kind of put on a shelf. But to be able to sing with Charlie meant so much to me, and Charlie
was not done as an artist, not by a long shot.”

Harris took every opportunity to cite the Louvins in interviews and to sing their songs on her
subsequent albums, dropping crumbs that helped lead musicians and listeners back to what she calls
“the true country music.” But The Louvin Brothers renaissance was bittersweet for Mr. Louvin, as it
left audiences clamoring for a sound he could not recapture.

“There are no more Ira Louvins,” Mr. Louvin said. “I’ve tried several, and I’d take ’em on the road,
and all I’d hear if I was doing duets is, ‘That ol’ boy you brought with you is pretty good, but he ain’t
no Ira Louvin.’ ”

Still, Mr. Louvin continued as a solo performer, touring, playing the Opry and recording for a variety of
independent labels.

“Today, he is probably best known … as the surviving member of a team whose songs Emmylou
Harris is resurrecting,” wrote Edward Morris in a 1979 Country Music magazine piece. But he added
that Mr. Louvin was “one of the most sensitive stylists in country music — a performer who could
stand in the rarified company of a Willie Nelson and a George Jones.”

In 2001, The Louvin Brothers were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. And in 2003, Carl
Jackson and Mr. Louvin’s niece, Kathy Louvin, produced a Grammy–winning, multi-artist Louvin
Brothers tribute that included Alison Krauss, Vince Gill and James Taylor.

“People ask, ‘Did you think, when you and your brother were recording these songs, that they’d still
be alive today?’ ” Mr. Louvin said. “I’d be the biggest liar in town if I told you we thought anything
like that. We were just trying to make a living. Some of them are just as true today as when we
recorded them. … Louvin Brothers music has lived and lived, but my CDs die before the next one comes out.”

That assessment proved false, though, as an association with Tompkins Square Records helped Mr.
Louvin’s solo star rise. His self-titled, Grammy-nominated 2007 album found him singing with Costello,
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and others, and he began touring on bills with acts who were far edgier than
much of what is heard on the Grand Ole Opry.

“It’s ironic that a man that’ll be 80 this coming July would start his career over,” Mr. Louvin said in
2007. “The good Lord has blessed me with good health, and I love to sing. If I don’t get out and do
it, it just means I’m lazy. And God knows I’m not lazy.”

Tompkins Square issued a succession of Louvin records, including a live effort recorded at a Parsons-
inspired music festival, released while Mr. Louvin was undergoing cancer treatment. He continued to
play shows, and November 2010 brought The Battle Rages On, an album of songs about war.


The last show goes on

In December 2010, Mr. Louvin made his final onstage appearances, taping Marty Stuart’s television
show on Dec. 2 and working East Nashville’s FooBar on Dec. 3. He collapsed during the Stuart taping
but righted himself and carried on.

His appearance on The Marty Stuart Show will air for the first time at 7 p.m. Saturday on the RFD-TV
channel.

“He was like a bulldog that day, just pouring it into the microphone,” Stuart said. “The last song he
did was ‘Back When We Were Young,’ a Tom T. Hall piece. At the end, it was like a hymn, with all of
us holding our breath.”

For Mr. Louvin, such a performance under adverse conditions was nothing out of the ordinary.

“In my world, you are worthless if you can’t continue,” he said. “Show business is all I really know
how to do. I would like for that to be the last thing I do.”

Mr. Louvin is survived by his wife, Betty, and sons Charlie Jr. (Sonny), Glenn and Kenneth.

Visitation is 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 12:30–1:30 p.m. Sunday at Harpeth Hills Funeral Home &
Memory Gardens, 9090 Highway 100. Mr. Louvin’s memorial service is 1:30 p.m. Sunday at Harpeth Hills.


Reach Peter Cooper at 615–259‑8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.



SOURCE : HERE


Louvin Brothers - I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby