I’m often asked in interviews to talk about the other guys in the group, which I gladly do. But that’s mostly about the performers with whom I’ve shared a stage for the last forty years. The obvious reality is that we’re performers for a couple of hours each day, but we’re men—and we’re friends—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I think one of the reasons we’ve had success, and experienced the longevity that we have, is due to the foursome that we are. As Johnny Cash convinced us so many years ago, there’s no denying that we have been blessed with something special. And part of that “specialness” is that we’re so different, yet at the same time, we’re able to come together as one group.

I think we realized more than ever just how special this foursome is during those years when Golden was gone. Steve Sanders, in replacing him, did a fine and admirable job, and we still made some Number One records with him in the group, but there was always that nagging realization—sometimes buried deep and other times just under the surface— that without Golden, something just wasn’t quite right.

Though not anymore, for a long time, the most frequent questions we’d be asked had to do with the timeframe when Golden was no longer a member of The Oaks. Friends and enemies, reporters and fans all wanted to know what happened and why. While it was a very major upheaval in our lives, and while it became the most public of breakups, simply stated, it was about everything and nothing, all at the same time.

We were seasoned performers. We were all high strung. We were on top of the world, and were making more money than we’d ever imagined possible. We probably felt invincible, and thought that it was going to last forever, which probably contributed to our breakup. We all had egos, of course. We all had big personalities, and we all occasionally had ideas that might have differed from one or all of the other partners. We had always been able to work those out. For some reason, though, this situation just grew beyond what we could manage.