Remembering Jim Reeves..

If you are or were a country music fan...you would remember the velvet

smooth voice of one of the all time greats, Jim Reeves.  Being discovered

in the late 1950's and having the zenith of his short career in the early

60's...he was a tremendous talent. It was on July 31st, 1964, fifty five

years ago this last week that he and one other were lost in a plane crash.

The following is a quick review of that incident.  Much of it taken

from Wikepedia............The best way to remember  Jim Reeves: play his music,

 and share it with someone who has never been exposed to it....he was awesome.

On Friday, July 31, 1964, Reeves and his business partner and manager Dean Manuel (also the pianist of Reeves' backing group, the Blue Boys) left Batesville, Arkansas, en route to Nashville in a single-engine Beechcraft Debonair aircraft, with Reeves at the controls. The two had secured a deal on some real estate (Reeves had also unsuccessfully tried to buy property from the LaGrone family in Deadwood, Texas, north of his birthplace of Galloway).

While flying over Brentwood, Tennessee, they encountered a violent thunderstorm. A subsequent investigation showed that the small airplane had become caught in the storm and Reeves suffered spatial disorientation. The singer's widow, Mary Reeves (1929–1999), probably unwittingly started the rumor that he was flying the airplane upside down and assumed he was increasing altitude to clear the storm. However, according to Larry Jordan, author of the 2011 biography, Jim Reeves: His Untold Story, this scenario is rebutted by eyewitnesses known to crash investigators who saw the plane overhead immediately before the mishap and confirmed that Reeves was not upside down. Reeves' friend, the musician Marty Robbins, recalled hearing the wreck happen and alerting authorities to which direction he heard the impact. Jordan writes extensively about forensic evidence (including from the long-elusive tower tape and accident report), which suggests that instead of making a right turn to avoid the storm (as he had been advised by the approach controller to do), Reeves turned left in an attempt to follow Franklin Road to the airport. In so doing, he flew further into the rain. While preoccupied with trying to re-establish his ground references, Reeves let his airspeed get too low and stalled the aircraft. Relying on his instincts more than his training, evidence suggests he applied full power and pulled back on the yoke before leveling his wings—a fatal, but not uncommon, mistake that induced a stall/spin from which he was too low to recover. Jordan writes that according to the tower tape, Reeves ran into the heavy rain at 4:51 p.m. and crashed only a minute later, at 4:52 p.m.

When the wreckage was found some 42 hours later, it was discovered the airplane's engine and nose were buried in the ground due to the impact of the crash. The crash site was in a wooded area north-northeast of Brentwood approximately at the junction of Baxter Lane and Franklin Pike Circle, just east of Interstate 65, and southwest of Nashville International Airportwhere Reeves planned to land.

On the morning of August 2, 1964, after an intense search by several parties (which included several personal friends of Reeves including Ernest Tubb and Marty Robbins) the bodies of the singer and Dean Manuel were found in the wreckage of the aircraft and, at 1:00 p.m. local time, radio stations across the United States began to announce Reeves' death formally. Thousands of people traveled to pay their last respects at his funeral two days later. The coffin, draped in flowers from fans, was driven through the streets of Nashville and then to Reeves' final resting place near Carthage, Texas.

(as a foot note...and this is a bit strange...well, more than a bit actually. 
While walking thru a second hand record store earlier this week... I 
happened to be going through albums when I saw this particular one..
and I remember my dad having it and others by Reeves and Eddy Arnold.
I thought...  gee maybe I should do a quick note about Reeves...kind of
remembering it was summer when he died in the airplane crash.
So, Friday, I quickly put the post together...then started checking the dates..
I composed the piece two days after the crash of July 31st.. and 
actually posted it on Aug. 2nd...it was 47 hours after the crash that they
actually found the airplane...on Aug. 2nd. Now that is just a bit weird..
even for me... a conservative type guy.)