My brother just “retired” with veteran’s benefits and disability, so I asked him on the third day of his retirement if he was making tick marks on his wall.
He mentioned counting flowers on the wall, and I asked him “Gatlin brothers or that other guy who is twenty or thirty years ago now?”
I was thinking of Eric Heatherly.
Ah, gentle reader: Before you ACKSHUALLY me (the semi-modern PDWL!), I have remembered via researching this post that it was the Statler Brothers who did it first.
Ai, they were both old when I was young (Eric Heatherly notwithstanding).
But when Sue F. came to visit us in our trailer in 1985…. I am pretty sure she said the bass Statler brother looked like an alcoholic, and I said he just looked fat. And then I swallowed the echo of my words, because she was overweight. Forty years later, I might be one, I might be both, or I might be neither.
But, no, the Gatlin brothers did not do that song.
Also, if you’re keeping track: Note that in 2000, I was listening to country and oldies. It would be decades before I got into metal, but a little less before I got into jazz.
