The printing presses were ready, and then Don Reid asked them to wait. His older brother Harold Reid, the deep bass voice of The Statler Brothers, had died from kidney failure on April 24, 2020 at the age of 80, and the career anthology the brothers had built together from memory could not go forward until Don added a personal memorial to the man who had stood beside him for sixty years.
That final tribute was placed at the front of the book before Mercer University Press released it, turning a complete song by song history into something far more intimate. It became a written farewell for fans and family alike, shaped in Staunton, Virginia, the hometown the Reid brothers never truly left.
The pages the two brothers had spent years piecing together became the farewell the pandemic had denied them in person.
Inside a converted three story redbrick schoolhouse in Staunton that had served for decades as the headquarters and museum for The Statler Brothers, Don and Harold had kept neighboring offices long after the quartet retired from the road in October 2002. Harold was six years older than Don and had helped form the group at Staunton and its Olivet Presbyterian Church in 1955 alongside Phil Balsley and Lew DeWitt, before bringing his teenaged younger brother in as lead vocalist in 1960.
Across the next four decades, first with DeWitt and later with tenor Jimmy Fortune, the group recorded more than forty albums. Don and Harold co-wrote over 250 of those recorded tracks, pairing Don and his nostalgic storytelling on hits like Class of 57 and Do You Know You Are My Sunshine with Harold and his deep bass lines and stage comedy as fictional B grade country singer Lester Roadhog Moran.
After their farewell tour ended in 2002, none of the surviving members moved away from Augusta County. Don turned his focus to writing books and published seven volumes of fiction and non fiction with Mercer University Press before taking on his largest archival project, The Music of the Statler Brothers An Anthology.
Arranged alphabetically, the book set out to document every song the quartet ever placed on an album, more than 350 tracks in all, along with the studio sessions, chart histories, and road memories tied to each title. Because the brothers had rarely written down the origins of their songs during their touring years, reconstructing forty seven years of recording history required piecing together decades of shared memory in Staunton.
Even as chronic kidney failure weakened Harold and required regular dialysis treatments in his late seventies, he remained the primary sounding board for Don. Sitting together in their hometown, the two brothers went song by song through old album tracklists from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
They traced which verses had been scribbled on hotel stationery after midnight, which arrangements producer Jerry Kennedy had shaped at Mercury Records in Nashville, and which comedy routines had started as off the cuff jokes on the tour bus during their eight years opening for Johnny Cash. Where Don remembered the lyric sheets and historical dates, Harold recalled the practical jokes, studio mishaps, and personalities inside the recording booths.
By the spring of 2020, the manuscript was finished and preparing for publication. On April 24, 2020, Harold passed away at his home in Staunton at age 80, survived by his wife Brenda, their five children, and his younger brother.
Because pandemic restrictions that spring prohibited large public gatherings in Virginia, the Reid family had to hold a private graveside service. Thousands of fans who had traveled to Staunton for decades to attend the annual Happy Birthday U.S.A. Fourth of July celebrations for the group had no public service where they could gather to honor the bass singer of the quartet.
With the printing presses still waiting, Don wrote that final tribute to Harold and placed it at the front of the anthology. When Mercer University Press released the 368 page hardcover in August 2020, readers received both the complete song by song history of the group and the written farewell from Don to his brother.
In the years following the release of the anthology, Don continued writing from Staunton, publishing novels including The Mulligan in 2021 and One Step Ahead of the Posse in 2022, and joining Balsley and Fortune whenever the history of The Statler Brothers was celebrated. Inside the pages of the August 2020 songbook, every track credited to Reid and Reid still carries the voice of the older brother who brought a fourteen year old boy to the microphone in 1960.