Nearly A Half Century After His Death, Jim Reeves Remains Popular Around the Globe.
Jim Reeves had come close several times, but he hadn't charted a No. 1 single in nearly four years -- not since He'll Have to Go, soared to the top of the Billbord chart in early 1960, where it remained for fourteenweeks. Now it was time for another try.
On July 11, 1964, Reeves entered the Billboard singles charts again with, I Guess I'm Crazy. It was one of those sensitive-lover ballads at which Reeves excelled and it too was destined for a long stay at No. 1. But the singer wouldn't live to see it happen.
Country music fans were still adjusting to the deaths of Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins in a plane crash seventeen months earlier when Reeves climbed into his single-engine Beechcraft the afternoon of July 31, 1964, for a flight back to Music City. Riding with him was his long-time pianist and road manager, Dean Manuel. The two were returning from Arkansas where Reeves had gone to inspect some potential investment property.
Reeves had invited Maxine Brown, of the singing group the Browns, to fly with him from Nashville, Tennessee to Little Rock, Arkansas, where her family lived, and she had accepted. Then, the night before the trip, her daughter became ill and she cancelled. Brown had flown with Reeves before and had been a close friend since their days together on the Louisiana Hayride.
It was raining hard late that afternoon when Reeves' plane appeared on the radar at Nashville's Berry Field airport. Then, just minutes before its scheduled touchdown, the aircraft disappeared from the screen. It took nearly two days for the more than 700 volunteer searchers to find the wreckage in a wooded area near the Nashville, Tennessee suburb of Brentwood. Many of Reeves' friends and associates took part in the search, among them his producer, Chet Atkins and fellow entertainers Eddy Arnold, Stonewall Jackson and Ernest Tubb.
An Associated Press story that ran on Aug. 2, the day of the discovery, reported that the plane was demolished and that the singer had been identified from a driver's license found in the debris. Reeves was 39. After a memorial service in Nashville, his remains were taken to Carthage, Texas, for burial. No doubt fueled by the notoriety surrounding Reeves' death, I Guess I'm Crazy soon accelerated to No. 1, where it remained for seven weeks.
Oddly enough, Reeves would have more No. 1 hits after his death than before. And thanks to the collection of demo, promotional and unreleased recordings he had his label, RCA Records stockpiled, his songs continued to appear on the charts every single year for the next 20 years.
At the height of his popularity, Reeves cultivated such foreign markets as England, Germany, Holland, Australia, India, Ireland and South Africa; all places where his records continue to be popular. Reeves even recorded a few songs in the Afrikaans language for fans in South Africa, and he made a movie, Kimberley Jim, there in the early '60s.
Jim Reeves was an accomplished songwriter as well, penning such hits for himself as Am I Losing You, Is It Really Over, I'm Getting' Better and Yonder Comes a Sucker.
Jim Reeves was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1967.
------------------------------------------------------------Researched and written by Richard Bell, Roots of Country Music, Nov. 25, 2011.
