In 2021, nineteen years after The Statler Brothers walked off a stage for the last time, Don Reid picked up the phone in Staunton, Virginia, to talk about a new book. The lead singer of the most awarded vocal group in country music had three Grammys, nine CMA Awards and a shelf of gold and platinum albums to his name. When the conversation turned to life after the road, he talked about none of them. He talked about Wednesday lunch.
A Standing Lunch in Staunton
The call went to country music writer Diane Diekman, and it had been set up by Don’s younger son, Langdon. Don was calling from the same town he had lived in all his life. The book was The Music of The Statler Brothers: An Anthology, a song-by-song account of everything the group ever recorded.
Somewhere between the albums and the stories, Don mentioned his week. Every Wednesday he had lunch with both of his sons, Debo and Langdon. They did not hurry. They sat for hours, catching up on family, handling business, and, in his words, getting to
everything that’s on our hearts.
He said he had also enjoyed simply having more time with his wife, Debbie. He was working from an office in Staunton that he shared with Phil Balsley, the Statlers’ baritone, whom he still saw several times a week. Because of the pandemic, the whole book tour had been done from that office by phone and video, and Don admitted he did not mind. It kept him off the highway.
Thirty-Eight Years on the Road
The road had been part of Don’s life since he was a teenager. Johnny Cash discovered the group in 1964, before Don turned 20, and they spent roughly eight and a half years as his opening act and backing singers. By the time Don was 20, “Flowers on the Wall” had reached No. 4 on the pop chart, and the touring never really stopped after that. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that for more than thirty years the Statlers ran one of the top-grossing road shows in the business.
What they refused to do was leave home. Most acts of their size moved to Nashville. The Statlers stayed in Staunton. In 1980 they bought and renovated the old Beverley Manor elementary school and turned it into their headquarters, with offices, a small museum and an auditorium. Starting in 1970, they also threw a free Fourth of July celebration in the town’s Gypsy Hill Park called Happy Birthday USA, which ran for 25 years.
Even when The Statler Brothers Show became the top-rated program on The Nashville Network, running from 1991 to 1998, home base stayed in Staunton.
A Final Bow in Salem
The end was announced quietly, through the group’s website and fan mailings. The farewell show, billed as “A Final Bow,” was set for October 26, 2002, at the Salem Civic Center in Salem, Virginia. Tickets sold out six months ahead of time, in less than 90 minutes. The group made a point of telling fans that nobody was sick. They were simply tired.
About 7,000 people filled the arena that night. Jimmy Dean introduced them. They opened with “Do You Remember These,” a 1972 hit Don had co-written with his brother Harold and Larry Lee. Before the night was over, Don read a list of people to thank. It was not a list of executives. It named wives, mothers, soundmen, managers and bus drivers.
They closed with “Amazing Grace,” the first song the group had ever sung together. The Associated Press reported that after 38 years of touring, the men from Staunton were coming off the road to spend more time with their families.
The Notes He Kept Without Knowing Why
Don did not stop working. He started writing books instead, beginning with Heroes and Outlaws of the Bible in 2002 and continuing through novels such as O Little Town, One Lane Bridge and Piano Days. He told Diekman he had largely set songwriting aside and written only a handful of songs since retiring, mostly for himself.
The anthology came about because his sons kept asking for it. For years Debo and Langdon urged him to write down the story behind every Statler song. Don was not sure he had enough to say. What he did have was a habit from the touring years: he had kept daily notes the whole time, without any clear reason. Writing the anthology, he said, was when he finally understood why he had kept them. He found he had far more to say than he expected, and he enjoyed every bit of it.
Home
The house in Staunton is shared with Debbie and a cocker spaniel named Lucy. On his own author pages, Don has introduced the household with a photo of Debbie and the dog he jokingly called a little demon. When the PBS program Write Around the Corner visited the home, Lucy came up in the same breath as Debbie and the boys.
The years after 2002 also brought loss. Harold Reid, Don’s older brother and the group’s bass singer, died at his home in Staunton on April 24, 2020, after a long fight with kidney failure. He was 80. Jimmy Fortune, the group’s longtime tenor, said afterward that Harold had been given almost eighteen years with his wife, children and grandchildren once the touring ended, and that Harold had counted it a blessing.
The trophies stayed in Staunton. So did the man who had spent 38 years on a tour bus, and on Wednesdays he sat for hours with his two sons and let the afternoon go wherever it went.