Charlie Louvin remembers his brother:
When Ira was killed by a drunk driver in 1965, he died with a warrant out for his arrest on DUI charges and with three bullets buried near his spine-the work of his third wife, who had shot him five times in 1963, after Ira had tried to strangle her with a telephone cord.
For Ira, to be a man was to be a drunk, and he was by all accounts the kind of drunk whose sickness looks and feels like a kind of possession. “Today they call it an illness,” Charlie says. “In those days it was bein’ mean.” Ira’s meanness was legendary. When Ira drank, he fought, cheated compulsively on each of his four wives, and worst for his career, [and] killed a tour with young Elvis Presley, a devoted Louvins fan
The article as a whole is a fascinating remembrance of the duo. Charlie died today at 83.
Lemkin 