He arrived at the most important audition of his life barely able to sing. When 26-year-old Jimmy Fortune drove from Virginia to Nashville in January 1982 to try out for The Statler Brothers, a fierce winter ice storm struck Tennessee and knocked out the heat in the motel room where he had been rehearsing. By the time he walked in to face Harold Reid, Don Reid, Phil Balsley, and founding tenor Lew DeWitt, his throat was sore and his voice was nearly gone.
What was at stake was a harmony that had defined country music for twenty-seven years. The four-part blend of The Statler Brothers began in 1955 inside churches around Staunton, Virginia. Alongside the Reid brothers and Balsley, DeWitt had anchored the right side of the stage, toured for eight years as the opening act and backing group for Johnny Cash, and written their 1965 breakthrough hit “Flowers on the Wall.”
Behind that success, DeWitt had lived with Crohn’s disease since he was nineteen. By late 1981, when he was forty-three, severe intestinal complications made the demanding routine of bus travel and nightly concerts impossible to sustain, and his doctors advised him to leave the road so he could recover.
His replacement had already crossed his path in an unlikely place. While visiting the Copper Mine Restaurant at the Wintergreen ski resort in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, DeWitt heard Fortune singing and playing acoustic guitar for diners. The Nelson County native was earning about a hundred dollars a night in ski lounges and local clubs and had recently decided to stop chasing music and look for steady factory or construction work.
DeWitt remembered the clarity of that high tenor and contacted Fortune in late 1981 to ask whether he would consider filling in temporarily while DeWitt underwent treatment. Several weeks then passed without word as the quartet considered how to handle the absence, until they finally summoned Fortune to Nashville in January 1982.
Despite the ice storm and his strained voice, Fortune sat down with the four men and harmonized with them. DeWitt, the Reid brothers, and Balsley heard enough in the way their voices blended to hire him on the spot as an interim replacement.
Fortune had only days to learn the stage harmonies and comedy timing before his first concert with the group in Savannah, Georgia, on January 28, 1982. Standing in DeWitt familiar position on the far right of the stage, he faced audiences who had watched the same four men perform together since the 1950s.
DeWitt refused to leave the young singer to face the skeptics alone and guided the transition himself. When it became clear by June 1982 that his health would not allow him to return to the road, he announced his permanent retirement from The Statler Brothers and publicly endorsed Fortune as his full-time successor so the group could continue without interruption.
He never asked for his place back
With DeWitt public blessing behind him, fans accepted the new tenor, and the Reid brothers encouraged Fortune to bring his own songwriting into their recording sessions with producer Jerry Kennedy. During a tour stop in tight quarters on the road, Fortune wrote the love song “Elizabeth,” which the quartet recorded for their 1983 album Today.
With Fortune singing lead, “Elizabeth” reached number one on the Billboard country chart in early 1984 and gave The Statler Brothers only the second chart-topping single of their career. He followed it by writing and singing lead on two more number-one hits with “My Only Love” in 1984 and “Too Much on My Heart” in 1985, along with the 1986 top-ten single “Forever.”
Following intestinal surgery in the mid-1980s, DeWitt recovered enough strength to record the solo album On My Own in 1985 and perform occasional solo dates at a pace he could manage. Even during that brief period of improved health, he never asked to reclaim his place in the quartet and left undisturbed the momentum and stability his brothers had built with Fortune.
When heart and kidney complications related to Crohn’s disease took DeWitt life on August 15, 1990, at age 52 in Waynesboro, Virginia, Harold Reid, Don Reid, Phil Balsley, and Jimmy Fortune stood together at his funeral. The quartet remained on the road until their farewell tour in 2002, and when The Statler Brothers entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, all five men were inducted together, including DeWitt and the young singer he had discovered in a Virginia ski lodge.