Late Country Legend Eddy Arnold Has Unfinished Business

6/23/2008 Mac McKinnon It’s not often that the bodies of the recently deceased are exhumed for evidential reasons, but such may be the case for late country music legend Eddy Arnold, who is the focus of a bazaar posthumous paternity suit brought on by a California man. Christopher Edward Tanner of Anaheim has filed papers with the Davidson County Chancery Court requesting that Arnold’s body be unearthed for DNA testing, claiming that he is the result of a small-time fling between Arnold and his mother, Arlene Tanner-Glynn. The paternity question was something of an issue for Arnold throughout his career, though he never refuted nor confirmed the rumors. Tanner-Glynn claims she met the musician while working as a secretary for Decca records in the late 1950s, and following Christoper Tanner’s birth, asked him repeatedly to take paternity tests, which he refused. "For one thing, what we've been told is that the petitioner is 47 years old, and it's pretty suspect that someone who really thought Eddy Arnold was his father would wait 47 years,” said Arnold’s estate attorney, Brian Howard. “The Tanners have had 47 years to do this, and to wait this long is just absurd.”