In the past eight months I've written three blogs on losses of great singers: Porter Wagoner, Hank Thompson, and Dan Fogelberg. Today we have lost another: the phenomenal Eddy Arnold, just a week short of his ninetieth birthday.



Born in Henderson, Tennessee (now a suburb of Nashville; then a small farming community) on May 15, 1918, Richard Edward Arnold began to try to make a career in music following the loss of the family farm when he was eighteen. Because of those roots of his raising, he was for many years given the billing nickname "The Tennessee Plowboy." Oh, what a voice! In the early years of country music, as we now define it, Arnold was a rarity, a singer who sang from his diaphragm rather than his upper chest and nasal passages, in a silky baritone that could extend effortlessly upward into the tenor range (as in his hits "Cattle Call" {1955} and "The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me" {1966}).

Those were later, though. Arnold began his career as a singer in Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys. He made his first recording as a solo act in December 1944, but it was two years later that he had his first hit, "That's How Much I Love You." Later in his career he had a television show, which he always closed with a gospel song, "May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You."

He could have been as major a pop star as Frank Sinatra or Perry Como, but he chose to remain in Nashville. In the 1960s, he scored a number of hits with full orchestration, becoming a "countrypolitan" singer; but he never went completely pop. He became a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966, and performed his final concert on May 16, 1999, although he continued to record until 2005.

Eddy Arnold lost his wife of over sixty years this past March. Shortly after her death he suffered a fall at his home and had been confined to a Nashville care facility until his death this morning. His friend and fellow Grand Ol' Opry star, Jim Ed Brown, has said that Eddy died of a broken heart.

If I might suggest two songs that epitomize Eddy Arnold for me, I would choose "That Cuddlebuggin' Baby of Mine" a swing tune that was according to the Web released in February 1963 but probably dates back a decade or more earlier than that, with no instrumental backing save a steel guitar, a piano, and an upright bass; the lack of clutter complements his winningly relaxed vocal. The other I would choose would be "You Don't Know Me," a 1956 release of a song he had written the previous year with the great Cindy Walker. The vocal is quite possibly the most achingly exquisite one ever recorded by a country singer, as the shy protagonist watches the girl of his dreams walk away with another man:

For I never knew the art of making love
Though my heart ached with love for you
Afraid and shy, I let my chance go by
The chance you might have loved me too. . .

you give your hand to me
and then you say goodbye
I watch you walk away
beside the lucky guy
to never, never know
the one who loves you so
no, you don't know me. . .

I didn't hear this on TV news; I ran across the item on Yahoo! As I was reading it, it began to rain, and has continued to rain the rest of the afternoon. Call me softheaded, call me a sentimentalist, but I prefer to think that the great singers who have gone before him are weeping for joy that he has come to join them.

The world is the poorer today.