Eddy Arnold Named in Paternity Claim

Christopher Edward Tanner of Anaheim, Calif., has filed a petition in Nashville to determine if the late country music legend Eddy Arnold is his father.

Tanner, 47, has asked a Nashville court to order DNA testing, which he believes will prove his claim. “I really don’t want to have to exhume the body,” Tanner says, “but we’ve got no choice now.” Bryan Howard, the attorney for Eddy’s estate, said that Eddy had denied fathering Tanner, but may not have done so publicly. Tanner's mother, Arlene Tanner-Glynn, has stated that she met Eddy while working as a secretary at Decca Records in the late 1950s. She said she asked the singer to undergo paternity testing while he was alive, but he never did. She said that although Arnold never acknowledged Tanner as his son, he never denied that he fathered the child––even after she went public with her claims in the New York Post in 1992. Howard has explained that Eddy’s grieving children did not want to deal with DNA testing as they prepared to bury their father. “[The Tanners] have had 47 years to do this, and to wait this long is just absurd,” Howard says.

• published June 18, 2008
• photo by SEÑOR McGUIRE/RLG