It’s Father’s Day today here in the UK, and so I thought I’d post a Dad-related Country song this morning.
Turns out that all the ones I could think of are sings about Dads who are either absent, alcoholic, dead, or all three.
Since my Dad is none of these things (at least, he wasn’t last time I checked), I thought instead I’d post a song by a Country act I know because of my Dad, which given that 99.9% of the songs I post in this series have come to my attention the same way, doesn’t exactly make today’s post anything out of the ordinary.
The Statler Brothers are not all brothers (two of them were) and none of them were called Statler. They had originally performed under the name The Kingsmen but when another band with the same name had a hit in 1963 with Louie Louie they decided they needed to change their name. They settled on Statler after seeing the name on a pack of tissues in a hotel room.
Apart from the other times I’ve posted songs by them, you may recognise them as Johnny Cash’s backing vocalists, which they started doing in 1964 and carried on until the early 1970s. You can hear them on his At San Quentin album, for example, and they get a name check on Closing Medley from that record.
Anyway, here’s a tune by them:
The Statler Brothers – Do You Remember These?
And to make this a little more Father’s Day friendly: in 2007, Grandstaff – who were Wil and Langdon Reid, the sons of actual Statler Brothers Don and Harold – recorded this as a tribute:
Grandstaff – The Statler Brothers Song
More soon.
A History of Dubious Taste 