Remembering Earl Thomas Conley

When I was a kid in Junior high, I would work weekends and summers at my dad’s sheet metal shop. My love of country music came from family members in record promotion and a distant relation to Faron Young. My Dad would drive and we would listen to country radio, mostly WJJD back in the day.

At the time, country music was a world a fourteen-year-old had a hard time understanding. But as a kid that knew he liked girls, there was one guy who seemed to really be able to sing a song that the ladies loved — that guy, was Earl Thomas Conley. I’m going off the top of my head, but when I think of songs like “Love Don’t Care” but I’ll always remember that line — “Love don’t care whose heart it breaks, it don’t care who gets blown away, if it all falls through as a bad mistake, love don’t care whose heart…it breaks.” Strong stuff. When he sang you felt it. He had huge songs like, “What I’d say”, “Once in a Blue Moon”, and “Holding Her, Lovin’ You.”

I never met ETC and that’s okay. I have an image of him that I would like to keep as a relationship between artist and fan. One of the best songs he ever did was a duet with the “Kentucky Bluebird”, Keith Whitley called “Brotherly Love”. As the song goes, “They shared the same last name and the same color eyes, but they fought like tigers over that old red bike”. The refrain ends with, “but we watched out for each other with brotherly love”.  ETC passed away today at the age of 77 — the “genuine article” in country music.

Perhaps it’s fitting on National Sibling Day he joins his brother in song, Keith Whitley. I loved ETC’s music, but as the song says. “Love don’t care whose heart it breaks.”

Peace
RR

Photo Credit by Kevin Herring