Jimmy Fortune joined the Statler Brothers in 1982 under circumstances that nobody involved had chosen and that required from a twenty-four-year-old Virginia musician a level of composure and a level of talent that most people at that age have not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate — stepping into the tenor slot left by Lew DeWitt’s departure due to illness, learning the harmonies and the stagecraft and the specific, intricate vocal architecture of one of country music’s most beloved and most precisely calibrated acts, and doing it well enough that the audience which had loved the Statler Brothers since Flowers on the Wall and Do You Know You Are My Sunshine accepted him with a warmth that spoke entirely to the quality of what he brought to those recordings and those stages.
He spent twenty-two years with them — from 1982 until the group’s retirement in 2002 — and gave the final chapter of the Statler Brothers story some of its most emotionally affecting moments, including Elizabeth, the recording that introduced him to the group’s audience as a songwriter of genuine distinction and that remains one of the most beloved songs in the entire country music canon. The truth about what those twenty-two years actually looked like from the inside — about the relationships between the four men who made that music, about the dynamics and the tensions and the specific, human reality of being both the newest member and one of the most creatively significant contributors to a group whose identity was already completely and deeply established before he arrived — is something Jimmy Fortune has carried with the loyalty and the discretion of a man who understood what the Statler Brothers meant to the people who loved them and who was not willing to complicate that love carelessly. What he has finally revealed about the truth of those years is not the comfortable, sanitized account of four men in perfect harmony but something richer and more honest and more worth knowing — the complete picture of one of country music’s greatest acts told by the man who saw it most clearly from the inside.
