Remembering Eddy Arnold

On May 8, a country legend passed away. Eddy Arnold was just shy of his 90th birthday when he died. He was very well known to those of us in the 50-plus-year-old age bracket. He was a big name in country music during the 1960s and 1970s.

I was about 8 or 9 years old when my dad started to listen to country music. His all time favorite was Jim Reeves. When Reeves died in a plane crash in the 1960s my dad started listening to Johnny Cash, Roy Drusky and Eddy Arnold. Both Eddy and Roy had similar song styles to Jim Reeves and that is why dad liked to listen to them.

Eddy Arnold had more love songs than most country singers at the time. He didn't sing about prisons or getting drunk, although he did allude to it (drinking) in more than one song. My dad was a romantic at heart and did like the love songs. I, on the other hand was just a kid and I liked songs that told a story. My favorite Eddy Arnold song is "The Tennessee Stud" a song about a horse.

Looking back to my childhood years with country singers like Eddy Arnold filling our house with songs it reminds me that it was a different time and way of life. Life was slower and simpler like the songs that Eddy sung.

As I grew into my late teenage years the country music scene had changed. The slow melodies and love songs had been jazzed up and now were more main stream in society. The line between country music and pop became blurry. In the 1980's and 1990's many of the old Eddy Arnold songs were now remade and sung by the newer song artists in both pop and country. I still have yet to hear my favorite song sung by anyone else other than Eddy.

My dad has since past away and I now have all his old record albums. I never play them but they are kept as mementos of times long past. There are at least 2 Eddy Arnold records among the collection but since I have not looked at them in years I can't remember if my favorite song is on one of them. Maybe one day I'll dig them out and show my teenage daughter her grandfather's record collection. I doubt that I would let her hear any of the songs since she would think of them as ancient history, much the same way I thought of Frank Sinatra songs when I was growing up.

The death of Eddy Arnold reminds me that an era has come to an end.