Jim Ed Brown Is Cancer Free

Jim Ed Brown has good news to share with his fans: The country music icon, who was diagnosed with lung cancer last fall, has been declared cancer free!

"Just this week actually, I did a test, and they said, ‘Jim Ed, we can’t find any more cancer cells,'" he tells Taste of Country. “I said, ‘Lord, thank you so much.’ You’ve got the radiation and the chemo and all of that, and they hit me pretty hard with it. But I’m doing good.”

After taking time away to battle the disease, Brown returned to the stage in January, after doctors told him that his cancer was in remission. The singer acknowledges that his fight with cancer had a silver lining: the support of his loyal fans.

I’ve got a stack of get well cards at least a foot high here," Brown tells The Boot. "It’s terrible whenever you have to get sick to find out who all your friends are! I’ve got an awful lot of prayer warriors out there, and I know that God has got to be listening to them because He sure is helping me get through this, and if there was any way that I could thank them all, golly, I would, but I don’t know how to do that."

The 81-year-old will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame later this year, which he says was the surprise of a lifetime.

“I show up nine o’clock Monday morning, and I go in and sit down, and I say, ‘Well, I don’t see a television camera. I don’t see anybody here to interview me,'" he recalls. "And all of a sudden, the president walks in and grabs a chair, and she sits down in front of me, and she says, ‘Just wanted to see your reaction when I tell you that you’re the newest member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.’

“I can’t go any higher,” Brown adds. “That’s it. You know, a hit record lasts a week. An award lasts for a year. But this lasts forever.”

Brown's latest album, In Style Again, was released in January. For a man who started his career decades ago, it was an entirely different experience to return to the studio so many years later.

"You know, through the years, I’ve loved to sing, and I’m always doing something or other, [so] I’ve kind of kept up with it and watched it, but these new engineers and the technology that they have today, it’s unbelievable that all of this can happen," he admits. "When I started in ’54, it was only one track on a quarter-inch machine. We didn’t have recording studios much around the country; we went into the radio stations and recorded our records. From there to this, it is unbelievable."

Purchase In Style Again on Amazon.