Artist:Steven Moore & Jed Clark Hometown: Jed Clark lives in Nashville, Tennessee, originally from Searcy, Arkansas; Steven Moore lives in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, originally from Bethesda, Ohio. Song: “New Camptown Races” (by Frank Wakefield) Release Date: June 26, 2024 (video)
In Their Words: “We are very excited to share our music video of ‘New Camptown Races,’ a tune by the late Frank Wakefield (June 26, 1934 – April 26, 2024) that has become a bluegrass standard. The idea for this video began at SPBGMA 2023, when we jammed to ‘New Camptown Races’ with both of us playing it in B-flat without using capos. We laughed and agreed that we needed to record it and maybe do a video shoot of it someday. It wasn’t until a year later at SPBGMA 2024, when we met up again, that we really solidified plans to make the video happen. Our hopes were to record the video and put it out on June 26, 2024 in honor of Frank’s 90th birthday. Unfortunately, the world lost Frank two months before he turned 90, but we decided to still aim to put out the video on what would have been Frank’s 90th birthday, in his memory.
“Frank’s prowess on mandolin, evident by his years performing with bluegrass legends like Red Allen and The Kentuckians, Jimmy Martin, the Stanley Brothers, and Don Reno, is often not discussed nearly as much as his personality. Frank was known for having an off-kilter approach to everything, from how he talked to how he approached the mandolin. Stories about Frank spray painting his mandolin red (an irreplaceable 1923 Lloyd Loar signed Gibson F-5) as well as baking that very mandolin in an oven in an attempt to enhance its tone are just a couple examples of his unconventional character. Our attempt to play this tune in B-flat without capos on guitar and banjo is a bit unconventional as well, and we hope that Frank would have liked it. Thanks, Frank, for the music, the stories, and this great tune!” – Steven Moore
Video, Audio, and Video Still Credits: Daniel Kelley and Bethany Kelley of Octopus Garden Studios.
(Editor’s Note: BGS is excited to debut a brand new column and feature series, First & Latest, which examines the discographies of artists, musicians, and bands by comparing and contrasting their first album against their latest album.)
Chicago-based, long-running bluegrass outfit Special Consensus have been making records since 1979, when they released their debut, self-titled album. Since then, they’ve put out about 20 records – and they’ve criss-crossed the country and the globe spreading their modern-yet-traditional, hard-driving sound. Banjo player Greg Cahill, who is also a bluegrass industry leader and community builder, is the band’s sole remaining original member and, across those decades, has been the linchpin, the keystone of what has become a true legacy act.
To mark the occasion of their latest release, Great Blue North (released May 12 on Compass Records), we compare and contrast the band’s debut record with this new project with Cahill – it’s First & Latest, from BGS.
What goes through your mind when you hear a song from that first record, like “Like a Train?”
Greg Cahill: I cannot believe it was so long ago! This was our first time in a recording studio and we knew nothing about the process of making a record. It was truly a complete learning experience and we had a wonderful engineer who was a master at finding the exact place to punch in, and he even manually lined up and spliced the ¾” tape on one of the songs so we could use the first part of the one pass and the second part of a later pass. The album is pretty basic and far from top notch, but we did our best and actually sold a good number of that vinyl record.
At that point, did you ever think this band would have such longevity?
We had no idea about where our journey would take us. Special C actually formed sometime in 1973 – two of us were grad students and two had full time jobs. By 1975, I had finished my masters degree and was playing in local pubs and venues while working a full time job in social work, and all I wanted to do was play the banjo. It was 1975 when bass player Marc Edelstein and I decided we wanted to try playing full time – to play and tour as much as possible to get this bluegrass bug out of our system and go back to “real” jobs/life in a couple years. The other two members decided not to join us for this ride, so we found a guitar player and a mandolin player and quit our day jobs to devote full time to playing music. Marc left the band a few years later but the plan didn’t work for me – the bluegrass “addiction” only became stronger. I just “kept on keepin’ on” with no set time limit on my musical journey and now here I am today, never dreaming I would still be going strong with no set end time.
What do you think has been the key to your spanning the decades in bluegrass – besides yourself, that is!
I have been most fortunate to have had some great musicians/people in the band over the years – and still do have wonderful bandmates. Of course I have experienced the ups and downs of playing full time – it was always worrisome when a band member left or when there were slow times but we always found side jobs and teaching opportunities to keep us moving forward. I guess I am just too stubborn to even think about not playing because I love making music so much.
There’s an energy, a drive, even in this earliest recording that you’ve continued to carry with you. Where do you think that comes from? It reminds me of classic Seldom Scene and Johnson Mountain Boys, like you’re always leaning a bit forward into the groove.
I found bluegrass music through folk music (Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Limelighters, etc.) and eventually Pete Seeger – whose music prompted me to buy a long-neck 5-string banjo and then a 6-string guitar and then a 12-string guitar. I played in a folk trio with friends in college, and one day I heard “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” and immediately knew I had to learn how to play the bluegrass banjo. I found the Earl Scruggs book and was obsessed with playing the banjo every free moment of my life and it was his drive and perfect tone and timing that overwhelmed me. Then I heard J.D. Crowe and he became my model and eventually my mentor of sorts, even before I ever met him. This was in the early 1970s. New Grass Revival also grabbed my ear, and I spent hours trying to learn J.D. solos but also Courtney Johnson licks, determined to not lose the drive when playing non-Scruggs/Crowe licks because at that time many folks felt that Scruggs style playing was the only “right” way to play the 5-string. It has always been about the drive for me – and I learned that from J.D. as well – he always had drive, even on slow songs that he played with superb finesse.
“The Singer” feels like that classic move of a bluegrass band playing a country song, can you talk a bit about what you remember about choosing that track and recording it?
We were city boys playing in big city pubs and venues where the general public had no idea what bluegrass music was. Although we always loved the traditional bluegrass songs and tunes, we felt we had to play some material that the general public might recognize and eventually really like our brand of bluegrass music. So we included old rock songs, country songs, and jazzy swing songs in the repertoire along with the traditional songs. I would say we actually became more traditional over the years, because we were building a local and then national and then international audience while maintaining a varied repertoire.
When I heard “The Singer” I immediately wanted to include that song in our repertoire – the song is so well written, the words are so poignant, especially knowing that Neal Allen wrote the song about his father Red Allen and also that Neal died of pneumonia while on the road. As Bill Monroe would say, “It’s a powerful number.”
Now, about the latest album, Great Blue North, what inspired you to cross the Great Lakes for this album and do Canadian bluegrass?
We are so fortunate to be on the Compass Records label and especially to have Alison Brown as our producer. When we begin preparations to record, the four of us and Alison begin our search for new material. We are basically on a bi-annual release schedule with the label and one of the songs Alison thought would be a good song for us to include on our 2020 release was “Blackbird,” written by the great Canadian songwriter/singer/guitar player J.P. Cormier. We loved the song but as we gathered material for that release the theme shifted to featuring a nod to Chicago, where the band has been based since beginning in 1975, because 2020 was the 45th band anniversary. Hence the 2020 “Chicago Barn Dance” release. We knew we would record “Blackbird” at some point, and after the pandemic shut-down we wanted to let folks know we were still alive and well and anxious to get back on the road, so we recorded “Blackbird” and Compass released it as a single. As we began the search for material for a new recording, Alison mentioned that it might be a good time to give a nod to our Canadian friends — since we have played there so much over the past three decades — and we all agreed. We then decided to include only songs written by Canadian writers and also to ask many of our Canadian musician friends to perform with us on some of the tracks.
Do you think being such a long-running Midwestern-based group informed the new album for you? And your connections to this material?
I think we may have had more opportunities to tour in Canada because of our Midwestern base. We did not play the big festivals when we first began touring there – we played shows for bluegrass associations and community centers in Toronto, Ontario (only an 8+ hour drive from Chicago), Winnipeg, Manitoba (13+ hour drive) and Calgary, Alberta (25-hour drive). We would head directly to Toronto or work our way through Minnesota to the Canadian gigs, which helped us get invited to the festivals. We also learned about the Canadian songwriters through so many of the great Canadian musicians whom we met and became friends with through this networking.
To me, a throughline between your first and latest albums is the arrangements, the way your band is always playing as a tight-knit ensemble, not just a handful of instruments sounding simultaneously. Where do you get the inspiration for the way your individual parts play off of and dialogue with each other?
I think we have always been focused on the power of tight and interesting arrangements. This again goes back to the fact that because we are from Chicago – not a bluegrass hub in the eyes of the general public – we had to make sure to keep the attention of the audience and not have songs begin to all sound alike. The arrangements give the band the opportunity to be more creative and to showcase the tight vocal and instrumental harmonies. I have always wanted an outside/non-band member producer to give us an objective opinion about the sound, the material and the performance. We have always had very good producers and I must say that Alison Brown is a phenomenal producer who has brought the band to another level. From our perspective, she basically considers each song on our recording to be unique and “special” – there are no “filler” tracks, and we spend however much time necessary to make each track stand out.
“Snowbird” will go down as one of Special C’s tastiest cover songs, do you have favorite covers from across the years? It’s kind of a hallmark of your band!
Although we try not to be seen as a cover band, we have chosen to cover some songs from artists that we feel we can make sound like a bluegrass song, and especially sound like a Special C song. We have been most fortunate to have been given some great songs by many great songwriters over the years and we have also chosen some songs from other genres that we thought we could have fun recording and that our fans would enjoy hearing. “Snowbird” was one of the first songs on our list once we decided on the Canadian theme after recording “Blackbird” – my wife had suggested that song many times and now it seemed like the perfect song to feature Greg Blake’s fabulous voice. Some of the covers we have done on past recordings include “Viva Las Vegas,” “Ramblin’ Fever,” “Dream of Me,” “I Cried Myself Awake,” “Big River,” “Sea of Heartbreak,” “Looking Out My Back Door,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “City of New Orleans,” our entire Country Boy: A Tribute to John Denver recording, “Alberta Bound” and several other songs on the Great Blue North release.
I must say, that as the years pass so quickly and the time between the first record and the current recording becomes so long I realize how fortunate and blessed I have been to be able to keep making music with so many wonderful musicians/people/friends. At times I have felt that the first recording was below the professional level but because of this interview and going back to listen to it, I now truly understand that we can only do our best throughout this journey, be thankful that we are able to keep growing and learning and appreciate our accomplishments no matter how insignificant they may seem at any given time.
My series of memoirs on the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion closes with a gallery of snapshots taken during the day’s proceedings. I had a new Japanese automatic camera of the type then described as “point and shoot,” an Olympus Quick Shooter Zoom.
I returned home with a 25-shot 35mm film roll and immediately sent it to a budget speed processing outfit in Seattle. The prints returned (along with a new roll of film and a mailer) a few weeks later.
Unlike today, when you can monitor photos on your digital camera after every snap, in 1989 you had to wait for the prints to arrive to see what came out and what didn’t. Here’s what came out.
I started outside the concert site, Memorial Hall, in the afternoon before the concert — sound checks were going on inside — taking care to get a close shot of the Hall’s sign on one of Dayton’s busiest streets.
Inside the hall that day, the stage was being set. Working as a stagehand, I helped handle communications between director Don Baker and the evening’s performers. Moon Mullins and The Traditional Grass and the Osborne Brothers were parked outside in their own vehicles. I first visited Moon and the band in an RV with the name, “The Cabin,” on the door. He introduced me to the band members, including his son Joe. Then I visited the Osbornes.
I hadn’t seen the Osborne Brothers since a Saturday night three years before when I was in Nashville to promote my new book, Bluegrass: A History. They’d invited me to be their guest backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, where Sonny brought me onstage, introduced me and spoke about the book — a very generous act. During the concert I asked a fellow backstage bystander to take our photo. Born in 1937, Sonny passed away last fall; he is sadly missed.
At about the same time I noticed Fred Bartenstein and Tom Teepen nearby and asked them to pose for me. They were important figures in the discovery and revival of Dayton’s bluegrass scene. Recently, I sent this photo to Fred (original editor of Muleskinner News) and asked him for a caption:
National editorial correspondent Tom Teepen (1935-2017, left) wrote an evocative memoir in the concert program about his days as a Dayton bluegrass fan. Here he meets backstage with Fred Bartenstein, who helped plan and organize the event.
The rest of my photos were taken at the Canal Street Tavern after the concert.
The executive producer of the event, Phyllis Brzozowska ran CityFolk from the start until its end about ten years ago. Behind her on the left is Greg Allen of the Allen Brothers. The individual on the right was one of the crew that director Don Baker enlisted from his Lime Kiln Theater troupe to help backstage.
Doug Smith and his wife, Dayton Bluegrass Reunion researcher and writer Barb Kuhns (both members of The Corndrinkers, an old-time band still active today) posed with Don Baker, concert director and emcee.
Harley Allen, a veteran star of several bands, had performed in the concert with his brothers. At the center of Canal Street’s evening’s activities, he’s seen here surrounded by friends.
The peripatetic mandolin virtuoso, Frank Wakefield, then living in Saratoga Springs, New York, and working with a Cleveland-based bluegrass/swing outfit, was bouncing around the room. I’d first seen him in action onstage in 1962 (Bluegrass Generation, 124-25); he was still up to his onstage hijinks.
Meeting Noah Crase was a special treat. I’d first heard his music in the late ’50s on an obscure 45 record by Dave Woolum. The evening’s program included a picture of him playing with Bill Monroe along with two men I’d played with in Indiana myself, Roger Smith and Vernon McQueen. We swapped Blue Grass Boys stories.
Another special treat. I first ran across Porter Church’s recordings on Red Allen’s County LPs from the mid-’60s. He was well-known in the D.C./Baltimore area, but I didn’t get a chance to see him in action until the Reunion.
The Sacred Sounds of Grass (Norbert Dengler, guitar; Sam Hain, mandolin; Thilo Hain, banjo; Alfred Bonk, bass)
I didn’t take notes about my snapshots — all that remained in my memory of this group was that these young men were from Germany, played bluegrass gospel, and were on their first American tour. I sent a copy to Mark Stoffel, mandolin player with Chris Jones and the Night Drivers, who’s from Germany. He told me he “knew them well,” and sent the band’s name and contact information.
I wrote to banjoist Thilo Hain and asked him to describe the circumstances that brought the band to Dayton that evening, and their experiences at the concert and the reception. He explained:
In 1988 his brother Sam Hain saw an ad in New York instrument dealer Harry West‘s sales list for a 1922 Gibson Lloyd Loar once owned by Pee Wee Lambert and now owned by Frank Wakefield. Sam, interested, “rang Frank Wakefield up to ask him more details about this instrument.” Wakefield told Sam, “Better get that mandolin, before anybody else gets it.”
Sam then asked Frank if he was planning a reunion with Red Allen and his band. Wakefield told him about the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion scheduled for April 1989. Thilo remembered, “Frank finished with the words, ‘You better be there!'”
Sam missed out on getting the mandolin, but the band was there in Dayton for the concert. Red Allen arranged for their free admittance and took them backstage to “a meet and greet with all the musicians,” and suggested they perform at Canal Street. “Dee Sparks,” said Thilo, “was so kind to let Alfred play his bass for the show. Throughout our first U.S. tour we earned so many friendly comments, felt heartwarming hospitality from all the great musicians we visited at their homes and went back to Germany with a huge bag full of new impressions and experiences.”
A Google translation of the band’s history on their Facebook page reads: “Sacred Sounds Of Grass is the oldest active Bluegrass Band in Germany, founded in 1979. With their classic Bluegrass Sound the group is also considered the most authentic bluegrass band outside of the USA.”
Thirty-two years after their Canal Street Tavern performance, the same band lineup appears in a photo, also posted at their Facebook page, of them performing in a church in Adelberg, Germany this past August. Here’s a recording from a 2019 festival.
Wild & Blue (below) was mandolinist and fiddler David Harvey’s new band, formed November 1988. On this night, when they came onto the Canal Street stage, David had already played with the Allen Brothers. Born 1958 in Dayton and son of famous mandolin player Dorsey Harvey (1935-1988; see Industrial Strength Bluegrasspp. 150, 183), he’d grown up in Parkside, a postwar housing development, together with Red Allen‘s four sons as neighbors. Their fathers both played in bluegrass bands — they all learned at home, jamming together after school as teens. By summer 1972 David was playing festivals with Red Allen.
In 1974, at 17, Harvey dropped out of high school to help support the family as a professional musician, joining the Falls City Ramblers. Parkside was a decaying, crime-ridden, rustbelt housing project; David saw music as a way to a better life.
A Louisville-based band that played a lot in Southwest Ohio, the Ramblers were local favorites with the same crowds who listened to the Hotmud Family’s eclectic blend of bluegrass, old-time, blues and early county. The chapter “Beck Gentry” in Murphy Hicks Henry’s Pretty Good for a Girl:Women In Bluegrass (pp. 186-191) gives a good history of the band. David was with them, playing fiddle and mandolin, for five years. In 1977 Kentucky Educational Television aired one of their shows:
In 1979 Harvey moved to Colorado Springs, where his musical career continued in a group called The Reasonable Band. He entered and won several mandolin contests, establishing an enduring reputation for his skill and creativity. He also began working as a luthier.
He moved to Indianapolis in 1983 and for the next four and a half years he played on the road and recorded with Larry Sparks. His career as a luthier grew. In 1986 he met Jan Snider, who, with her younger sister Jill, had been playing bluegrass. Jan and David soon wed.
Wild & Blue brought lead singer Jan’s voice to the forefront, solo and in duets with Jill’s high harmonies. They began around the same time as a number of other bluegrass bands with female lead singers were coming on the scene like Alison Krauss, Lynn Morris, and Laurie Lewis. The band had a lot of energy, with David’s suave mandolin work and its female-dominated trios. They won the band contest at SPBGMA 1992 and moved to Nashville in 1995. By then they’d recorded albums for Vetco and Pinecastle. Wild & Blue lasted until 1999.
Harvey then worked with Larry Cordle (1999-2001), Claire Lynch (2002-07), and Harley Allen (2008-11). Meanwhile his luthier work in Nashville blossomed. He joined Gibson in 2004 and today as Master Luthier heads Gibson’s Original Acoustic Instruments division. Here’s a video (above) in which Dave introduces one of the mandolins he’s building and illustrates it with a tune he co-wrote with his dad, “Cruising Timber.”
As a small boy Harvey had watched and listened to his father and Frank Wakefield as they wrung out mandolin ideas at his home. He clearly enjoyed himself with Frank this evening.
I had watched the evening’s afterparty at Canal Street with old friends from Lexington, Kentucky: the late Marty Godbey, author of Crowe On The Banjo: The Musical Life of J.D. Crowe. Next to her, husband, writer, photographer and musician Frank Godbey, creator of two influential bluegrass digital lists, BGRASS-L and IBMA-L. Next to Frank is Tom Adler, folklorist, banjoist and author of Bean Blossom: The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Festivals. And that’s my hat on the table.
Neil V. Rosenberg would like to thank: Fred Bartenstein, Phyllis Brzozowska, Nancy Cardwell, Frank Godbey, Thilo Hain, David Hedrick, and Mark Stoffel.
Working on CityFolk’s Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, I heard local terminology for the culture in which this music grew. “Industrial working-class Appalachian migrants” was rarely spoken. “Hillbilly” was said sometimes with disdain, sometimes with pride. The preferred in-group term was “briar.” Briars came from the Appalachian hills, transplants proud of their continuing organic down-home connections. I was told that the call letters of WPFB, where Moon Mullins had represented bluegrass for two and a half decades, stood for “We Play For Briars.”
Don Baker’s introduction to the second act of the reunion framed a dramatic shift of scene from Mullins’ milieu to a younger Dayton band: The Hotmud Family.
Inspired by the New Lost City Ramblers, this band began in 1970 playing old-time music based on pre-war hillbilly recordings. The band included Suzanne Thomas Edmundson, Dave Edmundson, and Rick Good, along with a succession of bassists. Suzanne, born in Dayton of Kentucky parents, was a second-generation briar. According to Jon Hartley Fox the Hotmuds were “perhaps the most significant band to emerge from the vibrant scene of the 1970s in southwestern Ohio” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass, 140-1).
They began including bluegrass in their sound during a 1974 appearance at the Mariposa Folk Festival. In blending old-time and bluegrass, they placed special emphasis on vocal harmonies, something many old-time bands overlooked. Between 1974 and 1981 they made eight albums and appeared widely at bluegrass and folk festivals. Here’s their 1975 bluegrass/old-time blending of “Weary Blues,” a song originally recorded in 1929 in Atlanta by Chattanoogan Jess Young’s Tennessee Band as “Old Weary Blues”:
The Hotmud Family came to be associated with Dayton’s Living Arts Center, described by Hotmud banjoist Rick Good in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (153-57). Established in 1967 by the Dayton Board of Education, this facility offered after-school instruction in the arts for grades 5-12 students in East Dayton.
In 1975 it began providing programs aimed at the local Appalachian-based culture. It turned to the Hotmud Family, now a nationally known band with an enthusiastic local fan base from their weekends at Sam’s Bar and Grill. At the Center, Hotmud gave lessons, ran a song circle, and led informal jam sessions. Once a week they held a live Country Music Jamboree, which was broadcast over WYSO, the Antioch College radio station. The Center closed in 1977, but the Jamboree continued with other performers at other local venues until 1986.
Act Two of the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion opened with a solo rendition of “Red Rocking Chair” by former Hotmud lead vocalist Suzanne Thomas Edmundson. Then came the group’s reunion, when Thomas was joined by the other founding Family members Dave Edmundson and Rick Good along with bassist Gary Hopkins. They did three pieces and an encore. During the 1980s the band gave occasional reunion performances. This was one of their last.
For Act Three, Baker’s stage directions began: “Beer Sign On.”
A borrowed neon sign hung onstage now lit up for the reunion of a band associated with Dayton’s bluegrass bar scene, the Allen Brothers.
Formed in the late ’60s to back their father Red Allen, they began performing without him and were touring in 1974 when brother Neal died. After a brief hiatus, the three other brothers (Harley, Greg, and Ronnie) carried on into the early ’80s, recording Rounder and Folkways albums. The new Smithsonian/Folkways album Industrial Strength Bluegrass — which just won Album of the Year at the 2021 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards — includes Harley Allen’s “Suzanne,” first recorded by the Allen Brothers in 1982, here recreated by Mo Pitney and Merle Monroe:
They continued to play together in the Dayton area into the mid-’80s, but by then Harley had begun a solo career, first joining banjoist Mike Lilly in a band Jon Hartley Fox calls “one of the best bluegrass acts Dayton ever produced” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass 136). In 1985 the Allen-Lilly Band closed a set at the Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival. Harlan County native Lilly led the way into “Little Maggie” with coon dog and motorcycle as Frank Wakefield watched:
Harley went on to a Nashville career as a singer-songwriter, winning two Grammys and singing on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack hit “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” before dying at the age of 55.
At the Reunion, the Allen Brothers put together a band with Harley on mandolin, Greg on banjo, and Ronnie on bass, with Wendell Barrett on guitar, and David Harvey on fiddle.
Here’s how they sounded with a similar band (different fiddler and mandolinist), with Monroe’s “Uncle Pen” enlivened by guitarist Harley Allen’s transformation of Jimmy Martin’s “G run” and a fancy ending, followed by a bluegrass trio rendition of the Paul Siebel’s classic “Louise.”
At the Reunion, they did three tunes and an encore. Then it was intermission time.
The second half began with Baker introducing Act Four, the Dry Branch Fire Squad. This band was led by mandolinist Ron Thomason, a Virginian who had migrated to the region as a child. Around since the mid-’70s, it’s still active today. Thomason came up in Dayton’s regional scene in the ’60s, working in bar bands and on the road with Ralph Stanley.
Committed to traditional bluegrass, Thomason, now living in Colorado, has had many talented musicians in his band. He is famous for his emcee work, which regularly grows into humorous monologue. Baker’s directions for this act listed two pieces (including one gospel song), separated by:
“Rap — Ron Thomason”
Here’s a sample of Ron’s “rap” — a comic speech from a 2007 California festival:
At the time of The Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, Dry Branch had four albums on Rounder, the start of a long string with that label. Like the Hotmud Family, they were folk and bluegrass festival regulars.
The band this evening consisted of Ron on mandolin, John Hisey on banjo, Mary Jo Leet on guitar, and Charlie Leet on bass. In 1987 a similar lineup recorded “Aragon Mill,” a Si Kahn song that Ron had learned while working at coal miner’s union rallies with Hazel Dickens:
Act Five brought on another performer still active today, Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers. Sparks had come up in the Dayton bar scene at about the same time as Ron Thomason. He worked with the Stanley Brothers and Ralph Stanley at the end of the ’60s and made his first album on his own in 1970s. He became a member of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2015 and has a new album out on Rebel.
At this concert his Lonesome Ramblers had a reunion dimension. Mandolinist and singer Wendy Miller, who’d played on Larry’s earliest recordings and was with the band through most of the ’70s, was back for this evening’s concert. Also in the band were banjoist Barry Crabtree and Larry’s son, Larry Dee, on bass.
They did three songs: “Dark Hollow,” “Face in the Crowd,” and “Kentucky Chimes,” all regulars from his albums and concerts. He closed with an eight-tune medley of his other hits. There are many videos of Larry’s great singing and lead guitar work. Here’s one of my favorites:
Acts Six and Seven dramatized the transformations of Dayton’s foundational 1956 band — The Osborne Brothers and Red Allen.
Act Six was all reunion. Red Allen had been officially retired since 1984, although he’d recently recorded four tracks on Home Is Where The Heart Is, David Grisman’s new Rounder album, joined on these tracks by son Harley and banjoist Porter Church, who’d been in his band The Kentuckians.
Red started this band in 1959 with mandolinist Frank Wakefield. In November 1961, in Nashville for the D.J. Convention, they cut six classic tracks at Starday with top bluegrass musicians of the day: Don Reno on banjo; Chubby Wise on fiddle; and John Palmer on bass. The whole great session is on YouTube:
Sierra Hull reprises Wakefield’s “Mountain Strings” on the new Smithsonian/Folkways album Industrial Strength Bluegrass. The track was nominated for IBMA’s 2021 Instrumental Recording of the Year.
In the early ’60s Wakefield and Allen worked out of the D.C. area, with a radio show in Wheaton, Maryland. In 1964 they did a Folkways album in New York, produced by David Grisman and Peter Siegel.
Soon after, Wakefield, whose innovative music is discussed by Ben Krakauer in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (182-183), began working with New York band The Greenbriar Boys and later he relocated to Saratoga Springs, New York. Here’s how he sounded in 2008 — still pushing the boundaries:
Red kept the Kentuckians going in the mid-’60s with a succession of great sidemen, among them banjoist Porter Church and mandolinist Grisman, who produced two albums of the Kentuckians on the County label.
In 1967 Red worked briefly for Bill Monroe and took Lester Flatt’s place in the Foggy Mountain Boys when Flatt had heart surgery. The next year he was in Lexington working with J.D. Crowe and Doyle Lawson.
By the early ’70s he was back in Dayton, working with his sons and playing locally what Rick Good calls “bargrass” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass 156). For tonight’s concert Red and Frank’s Kentuckians included Porter Church on banjo, Buddy Griffin on fiddle, Ron Messing on Dobro, and Larry Nager on bass.
During Red’s four-song set, Red Spurlock and Noah Crase, banjoists who’d played with Red during his early years, sat in for choruses with the band. A reprise of Wakefield’s famous “New Camptown Races” brought guest David Harvey, son of Dorsey Harvey, another influential mandolinist, to play harmony.
The final segment, Act Seven, featured Dayton’s Grand Ole Opry stars, the Osborne Brothers. Two days before the concert the Dayton Daily News said the Osbornes had “achieved the greatest fame of those taking part in this tribute to the flowering of bluegrass music in Dayton.” It would be hard for anyone to follow them. After joining the Opry in 1964 they’d moved from Dayton to Nashville. During the late ’60s and early ’70s, a string of country hits (“Rocky Top” is the best known today) led to industry awards for their vocal work.
With this success the Osbornes’ recordings moved toward a contemporary country radio-friendly sound, mixing pedal steel, piano, fiddle, drums, and electric bass alongside their bluegrass banjo and mandolin. Their live sound also changed. In 1967 they added electric bass; in the early ’70s, a drummer. Next came electric pickups on banjo and mandolin. They did this to make themselves heard in the big country package shows they were playing, where all the other acts were highly amplified. Their “going electric” was viewed with alarm in the acoustic-oriented bluegrass festival world, but it only lasted for a few years.
Throughout these years, their unique vocals remained a constant. They continued to record and tour. Their repertoire drew largely from decades of recordings along with newer material. They now carried a straight-ahead bluegrass band including fiddle and acoustic bass.
This evening, playing with the Osborne Brothers were Paul Brewster on guitar and third voice in the trio, Terry Eldredge on bass, and Steve Thomas on fiddle. They did four songs, all favorites from their earlier recordings, including a version of “Kentucky,” the Blue Sky Boys hit of the ’30s that they’d recorded for Decca in 1964 and which remained in their repertoire right up until Sonny’s 2005 retirement. Here’s an early ’90s Opry performance of it, introduced by Bill Anderson. The band includes future Grascals member Eldredge on guitar and third voice and Terry Smith on bass, along with second guitarist (and bus driver) Raymond Huffmaster, Dobroist Gene Wooten, and fiddler Glen Duncan.
According to Baker’s stage directions, the closing act consisted of:
“Music — Medley”
An earlier draft reads:
“[medley in B natural: each unit from each of the 7 segments chooses a song which they play when their turn comes]”
My memory of this is vague, but I think that’s just how the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion ended, in B natural. But it wasn’t over quite yet. In that day’s Dayton Daily News columnist Nick Weiser had announced:
“Following the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion at Memorial Hall, the Canal Street Tavern, located at 308 E. First St., will have a reception for the audience and the participants of the Bluegrass Reunion Show. Mark Bondurant will open the show at 9:30 with a reception to follow after the show. Many of the musicians from the Memorial Hall show are scheduled to get together and jam at the Canal Street Tavern reception. Admission is $1 at the door.”
Editor’s note: Read part one of Industrial Strength Bluegrass and the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion here
In 1987 I became involved with CityFolk’s Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, “An All-Star Salute to Dayton’s 40 Year Bluegrass History.” Between October 1987 and March 1989, I worked by mail and telephone to help shape the Reunion, planned for April 1989.
While this was to be called a “concert,” executive producer Phyllis Brzozowska envisioned it from the start as musical theater. I liked her idea — I’d long thought of bluegrass that way. My experience on the stage started at age 12, in a little theater company production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a small community in the early 20th century. Wikipedia describes the play this way:
“Wilder uses metatheatrical devices, setting the play in the actual theatre where it is being performed. The main character is the stage manager of the theatre who directly addresses the audience.”
In Dayton, playwright Don Baker would have a role like that of the stage manager in Our Town, acting the part of a loquacious emcee, telling the story of the Dayton bluegrass community. He would work from a script that Larry Nager was writing. As he spoke, a screen behind him would show slides relating to the narrative’s cultural and historical points.
The concert was divided into seven acts, “Segment/Settings” of 12 to 15 minutes. Each featured a different group of musicians and had room for three to five songs and an encore. Don’s narrations opened each act. Planning reflected concerns about the content and sequence of the acts. How was forty years of artistic ferment to be represented?
When I spoke of the project to my bluegrass buddies, the first question was always “Will the Osborne Brothers reunite with Red Allen?” This 1957 show gives a good portrait of the band’s sound and repertoire — cutting-edge bluegrass of its era:
As the bluegrass festival movement ramped up in the ’70s, Allen and the Osbornes occasionally crossed paths. The Osbornes were doing well on the country charts with songs like “Rocky Top” that featured Bobby’s solo and trio high lead:
Allen, considered one of the classic bluegrass lead singers, had gone on to work in several good bands. He still approached audiences as he had in Dayton bars. Larry Nager explains: “Red loved the spotlight, making the crowds laugh (often at jokes more fitting for a stag party than a bluegrass club)” (Industrial Strength Bluegrass p.89). An on-stage festival reunion with the Osbornes had been tried, didn’t work out, and was now out of the question.
Who else would be in the concert? At the start planners thought in terms of contrasts in categories like venues (working-class bars; upscale nightspots, colleges), audiences (industrial working-class Appalachian migrants, yuppies, college kids), and radio (country, folk).
As we’ll see later, these categories overlapped; that’s what gave the region’s bluegrass such vibrancy. Beyond categories lay personal dimensions: certain bands and musicians were like oil and water. The production committee faced artists’ and fans’ differing perspectives, values, and priorities. Terms bandied about during production meetings included “First Generation, Second Generation, Urban” and so on.
Another planning challenge: the concert featured some working bands, each on their own professional trajectory. But as a reunion it also featured retired individuals and groups.
The final concert performance sequence reflected our work to keep tension levels low, make things flow, and illustrate the artistic collaborations that had come out of this cultural scene.
My primary task was writing the introduction for the program, seeking to explain why CityFolk was presenting hillbilly music as heritage.
I was assisted by Barb Kuhns and Larry Nager, who were writing artist bios and gathering illustrations for the program. Musician and producer Nager knew the history from the inside, as his chapter, “Sing Me Back Home: Early Bluegrass Venues in Southwestern Ohio” in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (pp. 77-100) attests. Kuhns, professional librarian and fiddler with the Corndrinkers, an old-time group, had been active in promoting the music of some of the lesser-known pioneers in the local scene of which she’d been part for many years.
With just over a month to go until the show in April, I spent a March weekend in Dayton helping the planning production staff finalize concert details.
In early April CityFolk sent news to the press of the coming event. “Dayton show will reflect Kentucky bluegrass roots” was the title of a 12-paragraph story in Sunday’s Louisville Courier-Journal, Kentucky’s equivalent of the New YorkTimes. On Wednesday, the Dayton Downtowner, a weekly, carried two stories, and on Friday the DaytonDaily News (a supporter of the event) ran two generous stories.
On Friday night April 22, 1989, each of the concert goers who filled Memorial Hall — a Beaux-art national historic site (1907) of 2500 seats in downtown Dayton — received a 16-page 8 ½ x 11 program. Its cover duplicated the concert’s posters.
On the first page was Phyllis Brzozowka’s introduction. Next, an essay by former Dayton newspaperman Tom Teepen, who told the evocative story of his experiences with the music in Dayton.
My piece, “Industrial Strength Bluegrass,” filled the next four pages. Then came seven photo-packed pages devoted to “The Artists”: Paul “Moon” Mullins and Traditional Grass, Noah Crase and the Valley Ramblers, The Hotmud Family, The Allen Brothers, Red Allen, The Dry Branch Fire Squad, Larry Sparks and Wendy Miller, Frank Wakefield, David Harvey, and the Osborne Brothers.
The booklet closed with several pages of lists: a “Selected Discography” including addresses for local and national retailers; planning production staff; thanks for assistance; CityFolk staff; board of trustees. Its endpapers were a map of southern Ohio, with portions of Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. A lot to look at while waiting for the curtain to rise!
Behind the curtain, Baker’s Lime Kiln workers provided lighting and a stage manager. I was part of the backstage crew. And the sound was something else! Afterwards Phyllis wrote:
Pete Reineger, from the National Council for the Traditional Arts and a local crew…ran an equivalent of 4 stages with 36 open microphones throughout the performance.
I have been unable to locate any recordings of this event — no tape, no video. I saved a copy of Baker’s stage directions, which lay out the concert’s sequence. But Larry Nager’s script for his narrative, which told the history of Dayton bluegrass in seven segments, one for each act, no longer exists. In it, he recalled, Don’s role was that of “theomniscient voice of the hillbilly diaspora.”
Though the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion is now a lost play, its structure can be seen from Baker’s stage directions. However, because I was busy bustling around backstage, I didn’t know how the concert was going over with the audience until later.
The reunion began with an introduction by Phyllis, following that came sounds from offstage, described in the stage directions as:
Halsey & Meyers Commercial
Radio Rap — Moon Mullins.
Halsey Myers is still a going concern. Joe Mullins says that the Traditional Grass, the band he worked in with his father Moon from 1983 to 1995, recorded a radio commercial for this Middletown hardware store. It was so popular they got requests for it at personal appearances. Joe and his son Daniel found an old cassette recording of the ad followed by an example of Moon’s colorful on-air WPFB persona:
These radio clips would have been familiar to many in the audience who knew the local bluegrass scene. Paul “Moon” Mullins was the true loquacious voice of Appalachian migrant music — bluegrass — in southwest Ohio.
As the curtains opened Baker took the stage to tell the story of Mullins and the music. Photos synced to the script appeared on a screen behind him. Some were of Dayton musicians and venues, while others evoked a variety of historical and geographical milieus ranging from Dayton to national and international.
Baker’s light dimmed and focus shifted to the other side of the stage, where Mullins and his band, The Traditional Grass, were highlighted. Mullins had come to Dayton from Kentucky in 1964 to take a job as a DJ at WPFB, a Middletown country station that had been a bluegrass center in the 40s and 50s. Jimmy Martin, the Osborne Brothers and many others had performed there. The short-lived Martin-Osborne band’s hit trio “20/20 Vision” from those days is recreated by Dan Tyminski on the new Smithsonian Folkways album, Industrial Strength Bluegrass:
In the mid-’60s WPFB had dropped bluegrass but Mullins brought it back. He’d started his radio and musical careers (he’d fiddled with the Stanley Brothers) in eastern Kentucky. Migrant audiences in southwestern Ohio bonded with him. He revitalized the music at WPFB and began playing with local bands.
I first saw his name in June 1968 when we were both on the flyer for Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Festival at Bean Blossom, Indiana. I was in the banjo workshop (with Ralph Stanley, Dave Garrett, Bobby Thompson, Vic Jordan, and Larry Sparks); “Paul Mullins, WPFB Radio, Middletown, Ohio” was emcee for the Saturday shows, co-hosting on Sunday with Grant Turner of the Grand Ole Opry.
Twenty-one years later, on the evening of the Reunion, Mullins had recently left WPFB. He’d started The Traditional Grass in 1983 (they would continue until 1995); it included his son Joe, who was singing tenor, picking banjo, and following his dad’s footsteps in radio. Guitarist Mark Rader was the lead singer, and Glenn “Cookie” Inman, bassist. They opened with “Weary Lonesome Blues,” a popular Delmore Brothers song from 1937:
After three more songs, everyone except Moon left the stage and he was joined by members of The Valley Ramblers, a band he’d co-founded with Noah Crase in the late ’60s. Crase was a highly respected banjo player, a former Blue Grass Boy best-known for “Noah’s Breakdown,” the tune that started Bill Keith on his exploration of melodic banjo.
Editor’s note: Read part one of Industrial Strength Bluegrass and the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion here
Neil V. Rosenberg would like to thank Barb Kuhns, Daniel and Joe Mullins, and Larry Nager
On April 22, 1989, Cityfolk, a Dayton, Ohio-based concert series, mounted their most ambitious evening to date, The Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, “An All-Star Salute to Dayton’s 40 Year Bluegrass History.” It was held at Memorial Hall in downtown Dayton.
I’m reminded of this concert now because of an essay I wrote for its program booklet: “Industrial Strength Bluegrass.” That is the title of a new book by Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, subtitled “Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy.” This anthology presents a remarkable in-depth portrait of a key regional bluegrass scene, which co-author Bartenstein has likened to seminal regional scenes in other genres like blues (Chicago) and jazz (New Orleans).
In March, Smithsonian Folkways released a 16-track album with the same title, edited by Joe Mullins and son Daniel Mullins. On it are 16 contemporary recordings by today’s leading bluegrass artists, doing the region’s key repertoire — like “Once More,” the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen’s 1958 high lead trio, recreated on the album by The Grascals; and “20/20 Vision” by Jimmy Martin and Osborne Brothers in 1954, done here by Dan Tyminski. Joe Mullins opens the album with his band, The Radio Ramblers, doing “Readin’, Rightin’, Route 23,” an anthem to the Appalachian migrants who nurtured bluegrass in the region.
My experience with the Dayton Bluegrass Reunion began in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the fall of ’87 at an annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS). One month to the day after the Earl Scruggs Celebration, I met Phyllis Brzozowska, executive director of Cityfolk, “an arts organization,” as she later wrote, “working full time to bring to the public the variety and excellence that exists in traditional arts today.”
Phyllis grew up with Irish dancing in Dayton. By 1978 she had a Celtic music radio show on WYSO-FM, the Antioch College station, and began booking bands. “A band I knew from Pittsburgh called ‘Devilish Mary’ was coming through town. They were a great dance band that played ole’ timey music and Irish traditional music.” She and a friend organized a “ceili” at a downtown club in Dayton. By 1981 she’d formed Cityfolk.
By 1987, Cityfolk had branched out from Irish to include other roots music in their events — including bluegrass. In the 1980s a broadening of interest in the traditional arts was nurtured through public sector folklore lobbying in Washington. The Festival of American Folklife, established in 1967 by Ralph Rinzler at the Smithsonian, led to the establishment of a Folk Arts department at the National Endowment for the Arts and the creation of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The National Folk Festival, around since the ’30s, moved to Washington and became the National Council for Traditional Arts (NCTA) in 1976.
These national institutions supported performing arts markets for traditional artists. Local and regional arts organizations like Cityfolk and PineCone grew and flourished during the ’80s, and public folklorists were active in the AFS. Phyllis was wanting to talk with me because I’d written a book about bluegrass. She was planning a reunion concert to celebrate 40 years of bluegrass in Dayton, applying for funding from the Ohio Arts Council and the Dayton Performing Arts Fund. She asked me if I would work as a consultant and writer for this event’s program.
Brzozowska wanted to tell the story of bluegrass in Dayton as dramatically as possible, so they were hiring Don Baker, “one of the leading theater directors in the South.” Baker had grown up in Appalachia and started his career at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. In 1984 he co-founded Lime Kiln, a theater in Lexington, Virginia.
For the Reunion, Brzozowska later recalled, Baker “constructed a theatrical foundation on which the music and narrative would be presented. He also designed the set, contributed input to the script, set the pacing of the show and when the lights went up, was the perfect stage M.C. for the evening.”
In producing the show Brzozowska took counsel from three Dayton old hands — Harley Allen, Fred Bartenstein, and Paul “Moon” Mullins. Additional input came from old-time fiddler and Dayton City librarian Barb Kuhns and writer-musician Larry Nager. As a consultant and writer, I worked with them on the planning of the concert and on program booklet. I also helped backstage on the night of the concert.
My experiences with southwestern Ohio bluegrass began in the late fifties. Oberlin classmate Jeff Piker came from Cincinnati as a freshman in ’58. Inspired by a Pete Seeger concert at Antioch, he’d bought a used Vega banjo at a music shop in the Appalachian migrant neighborhood of Over-The-Rhine that Nathan McGee writes about in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (pp. 164, 166). It had homemade Scruggs pegs!
That made Piker a popular guy with us campus bluegrass jammers. We all borrowed the banjo to learn how to use the pegs. During the January 1959 winter break we took it with us when we went to Yellow Springs to visit Antioch College friends. Bluegrass was catching on there.
Chuck Crawford, Neil V. Rosenberg, Franklin Miller III at Pyle Inn, Oberlin, Ohio, January 1959
A year later, in March 1960, our band opened for the Osborne Brothers at Antioch. I’ve written about that in Bluegrass: A History (pp. 155-58). In 1962, another band I was in opened at Antioch, for Sid Campbell and Frank Wakefield, and I’ve written about that too, in Bluegrass Generation: A Memoir (119-123).
One detail from that 1960 concert I didn’t mention: when Jeremy Foster called to invite us to open the show for the Osbornes, he said he’d booked the Osborne Brothers because they were nearby and available. We knew of this band only from the sound of their MGM album, The Osborne Brothers and Red Allen. Jeremy was disappointed that they had changed — Red Allen was no longer with them. That made their music less appealing to him. But, as I learned later, Bobby and Sonny didn’t want fancy guitar backup and didn’t need a flashy lead singer. They were focused on their trio.
In the fall of 1963, when I was managing Bill Monroe’s park, the Brown County Jamboree, in Bean Blossom, Indiana, we got reacquainted when they gave their first show there (Bluegrass Generation, pp. 224-226). With Benny Birchfield playing guitar and singing the lowest voice in the trio, they had moved from MGM to Decca. Their first single, “Take This Hammer,” had just come out. Their final MGM album, Cutting the Grass, was due out soon.
They were polishing the high lead trio they’d been working on for five years. That winter I taped them guesting on the WSM’s after-the-Opry broadcast, Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree. Their harmonies were attracting attention in country music circles.
At Bean Blossom, Bobby and Sonny had told me about their regular Thursday night gigs Ruby’s White Sands in Dayton and invited me to come over some time. In May ’64, Jim Work and I took friends from California, Jerry Garcia and Sandy Rothman, to see them there.
The Osbornes joined the Opry a few months later. By then they were coming to Bean Blossom twice a year and we’d gotten better acquainted. “Banjer” talk with Sonny was always entertaining. He had experimental bridges, banjos, and capos. On stage, he had great new licks for every show.
With Bobby I shared an interest in bluegrass history. One Sunday in 1964 I invited the band back to our apartment in Bloomington for supper. While they were there I showed Bobby the work I was doing on the Bill Monroe discography and asked him if he was interested in doing something like that for the Osborne Brothers. He was. We began corresponding about their discography, and started trading tapes.
Benny Birchfield left the Osborne Brothers at the end of ’65. The following spring, in Cincinnati for an academic meeting, I ran into him at the Ken-Mill Café in Over-The-Rhine. He was playing bass in a band that included lead singer and guitarist Jim McCall, with Vernon McIntyre Jr. on banjo. Benny introduced me to the band as a banjo picker from Bean Blossom and invited me to sit in for a set on banjo. That was fun.
On Labor Day, 1966, Carlton Haney held his second Roanoke Bluegrass Festival in Fincastle, Virginia. The Osborne Brothers were there — riding high with their first charted Decca hit, “Up This Hill and Down.” Their Sunday trio on “I Hear A Sweet Voice Calling” with Bill Monroe was one of the high points of the festival that year — a religious experience for many who heard it.
At that festival, my first, I finally met Pete Kuykendall. We’d been corresponding and trading tapes for several years, and he’d published bluegrass discographies in the mimeo magazine Disc Collector. Now he was promoting a new bluegrass monthly, Bluegrass Unlimited. I told him about the Osborne Brothers discography, and he agreed to publish it in BU (it appeared the following July). Promoter Haney invited me to join him, Ralph Rinzler, and Mayne Smith in introducing Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys and The Osborne Brothers in a special broadcast about the festival on the local TV channel.
In April 1967 I saw them at a club outside Indianapolis. The third voice in the trio was now being sung by Harley Gabbard, later the co-founder of The Boys from Indiana. His name comes up often in Mac McDivitt’s chapter on the southwest Ohio recording scene in Industrial Strength Bluegrass (pp. 43-76). One of Gabbard’s contributions to the regional repertoire, “Family Reunion,” written with his nephew, Aubrey Holt, is performed on the new Folkways CD by Rhonda Vincent and Caleb Daugherty.
I saw Gabbard again the following October when he dropped in and sang bass on one cut we were recording for George Brock’s gospel album at Rusty York‘s Jewel Records in Mt. Healthy, Ohio. McDivitt’s chapter also devotes a section (pp. 63-65) to Jewel and York’s remarkable careers in bluegrass and rockabilly. Here’s Harley Gabbard with the Osbornes doing what was, as of May ’67, their new single: “Roll Muddy River.”
So, during the years I’d lived in Indiana (1961-68) I’d dipped into the Southwestern Ohio bluegrass scene a number of times. I knew some of the music, some of the people and some of the history. But I had been living in Newfoundland for twenty years. Fortunately Barb Kuhns (Dayton City librarian) and Larry Nager knew the Dayton region scene deeply in a way I didn’t, which was essential, because the sequence and repertoire of the concert had to reflect the drama of the reunion story.
Though it’s not that hard to find some who will argue the point, bluegrass is widely held to have originated when banjo phenom Earl Scruggs joined Grand Ole Opry star Bill Monroe’s band in early December, 1945. Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys — the possessive wasn’t just there for show — were already among the anchors of the radio show’s cast, but contemporary accounts (and a handful of bootleg recordings) make clear that, to the ears of an almost instantly enraptured audience, Scruggs’ rapid-fire banjo playing elevated the group’s sound to a new level.
Almost instantly, groups sprang up — or reoriented themselves — in pursuit of the new sound, and although banjo players and fiddlers were the most obvious converts, the truth is that virtually all of the intricacies the band brought to their sound were soon emulated. By the time Scruggs and guitarist/lead singer Lester Flatt left the Blue Grass Boys at the beginning of 1948, the quintet’s live performances and a handful of recordings had already inspired some notable followers, who, out of artistic desire and commercial necessity, quickly busied themselves in developing their own distinctive takes on the sound of the “original bluegrass band.”
As we near the 75th anniversary of this foundational origin story, BGS will be looking back across the sweep of those years — and first up, of course, a clutch of true pioneers that share a common accomplishment: they are the acts honored by induction into the IBMA’s Hall of Fame in its first five years and their plaques proudly hang at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky.
Bill Monroe (inducted 1991)
A complex personality with a skill set that included equal measures of innovation and synthesis, the mandolin-playing Monroe (b. 1911) moved from a mid-1930s duo with his brother to assembling a hot string band during World War II to fronting that original bluegrass band — an achievement which earned him his “Father of Bluegrass” title. Though it’s easy to discern the elements he brought together in that music — old fiddle tunes; Scotch-Irish ballads; African-American blues, jazz and gospel; western swing and more — his creativity extended beyond simply stirring them together and kept him a central figure from its inception until his death in 1996.
Indeed, while his early classics are essential to the bluegrass canon, even his late-life instrumental compositions have enjoyed a growing influence among today’s hottest young players. In fact, he collected his first Grammy for 1988’s “Southern Flavor.” Monroe was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, and as the composer of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” he joined the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 1993, and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence in 1997.
Though he wasn’t yet 22 years old when he joined Monroe’s band at the end of 1945, Earl Scruggs (b. 1924) was ready to step into the spotlight, and, with the exception of a stretch of ill health in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, he never relinquished it until his death in 2012. Unlike many instrumentalists who change their approach according to musical context, Scruggs believed that his picking style — built around right-hand patterns called “rolls” — could fit anywhere, and after his groundbreaking years with Monroe and then Lester Flatt, his career seemed devoted to proving the point.
Having created much of the musical vocabulary for bluegrass banjo picking, he moved on to playing with his sons in the Earl Scruggs Revue, a country-rock-bluegrass fusion band that was arguably more successful — at least in commercial terms — than Flatt & Scruggs had ever been. In the 21st century, Scruggs championed a broad variety of younger musicians while continuing to play those same sweet rolls he’d created as a young man. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 2008.
With an expressive, emotive voice and an impressive array of demeanors that ranged from dry and sly to devout and down-home, rhythm guitarist Lester Flatt (b. 1914) was the perfect musical complement to Earl Scruggs, and their 1948-1969 output was at least as influential as Monroe’s. Flatt & Scruggs won a 1968 Grammy for their classic recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
But where Scruggs was not only interested in playing with his sons, but also interested in putting his banjo into a wider range of contexts, Flatt preferred sticking to the country side of bluegrass. In the aftermath of their breakup, Flatt’s drawl deepened and slowed as he presided over a series of gifted lineups that included peers like Josh Graves and Vassar Clements, alongside young up-and-comers from banjoist Kenny Ingram to a teenaged Marty Stuart. Flatt & Scruggs were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985.
The career of Ralph Stanley (b. 1927) and Carter Stanley (b.1925) illustrates both the profound impact that the original bluegrass band had on their peers, as well as the complementary artistic and commercial drives that impelled those successors to create their own unique style. In their first recordings, made while Flatt and Scruggs were still Blue Grass Boys, you can hear the Virginia-born Stanley brothers revamp their old-time string band approach into an approximation of the pioneers’ sound, yet within a matter of months, they had found a compelling variant.
The Stanley sound was built in part around Ralph’s stolid but driving banjo and soulful tenor singing, but even more around Carter’s mournful lead vocals and powerful songs. Over the years, while they moved from the Nashville-based Columbia and Mercury labels to scrappy (and multi-racial) Cincinnati indie, King, their sound became even more recognizable, as owner Syd Nathan hectored them into de-emphasizing the fiddle and leaning more into the innovative work of flatpicking lead guitarists like George Shuffler. The brothers’ partnership came to an end in late 1966 with the early, alcohol-related death of Carter; Ralph would continue on with his own twist on the Stanley Brothers’ sound until his death in 2016.
The first banjo player to follow Scruggs, albeit briefly, in the Blue Grass Boys, Don Reno (b. 1926) deliberately sought to create a distinct and instantly recognizable style of his own on the instrument. By the time his partnership with singer-guitarist Red Smiley (b. 1925) had settled into regular recording for King Records in the early 1950s, he had succeeded completely, and for good measure had done the same with flatpicked guitar solos, too. As Grand Ole Opry announcer Eddie Stubbs once put it, Reno & Smiley were a country band with a banjo instead of a steel guitar.
Though Reno could and sometimes would blister a banjo solo, many of the band’s signature numbers were heart songs, country shuffles, earnest gospel outings and more, including occasional flashes of rockabilly and jazz. Reno wrote many of them, sang tenor and occasional leads, and shared the instrumental limelight with their steady fiddler, Mack Magaha, and occasionally with one or another mandolin player, including his son, Ronnie. The partners split for a few years in the mid-‘60s, then reunited for a brief period before Smiley’s death in 1972. Reno continued to record and perform with partners ranging from Bill Harrell to his sons until he passed away in 1984.
Though Jim McReynolds (b. 1927) and Jesse McReynolds (b. 1929) were born just a few dozen miles from the Stanley Brothers, the music of Jim & Jesse could hardly have been a more different kind of bluegrass. The duo’s singing was smooth and refined — especially guitarist Jim’s silvery tenor — while the instrumental sound was driven by Jesse’s innovative mandolin cross-picking and their overall approach by the latter’s eclectic tastes and influences (he appeared, for instance, on The Doors’ 1969 album, The Soft Parade).
The brothers were comfortable in reaching for a more countrified sound, helped by banjo players like Allen Shelton and Carl Jackson, who were adept at playing radio-friendly licks on a dobro-banjo as well as ‘grassier fare when that was called for. Smart businessmen as well, the duo were among the first to appear on television in the early 1950s, recorded an entire album of Chuck Berry songs in the mid-1960s, started their own label in the early 1970s, and remained a popular fixture on the Grand Ole Opry until Jim’s death on the last day of 2002. As of this writing, Jesse McReynolds continues to perform — and to innovate, too, with releases like a 2010 Songs of the Grateful Dead collection.
Nicknamed “The Voice With a Heart,” Virginia’s Mac Wiseman (b. 1925) was a founding member of Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948, but soon left to join Monroe (and Don Reno) in the Blue Grass Boys. By the early 1950s, he’d started his own career, recording for Gallatin, Tennessee’s Dot Records — and then going to work for the label. A consummate professional, he also served as a musicians’ union official for a time, and was a founding member of the Country Music Association. He frequently recorded material other than bluegrass, especially when rock ’n’ roll and the pop-country Nashville sound beckoned in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and throughout his career, he was never afraid to use a variety of instruments besides the archetypal bluegrass ones.
Still, as a performer, bluegrass was his bread and butter from the mid-1960s on, and rather than carry a band, he would recruit players from other acts (and occasionally skilled amateurs, too) and lead them on stage with a heavy guitar strum and a quick “watch me, boys!” Wiseman’s songbook included old folk numbers, songs he heard on the radio as a polio-stricken child, big band tunes, Music Row compositions and much more. In later years, he recorded several memorable projects that highlighted songs his mother had taught him and songs that told his life story, before his death in 2019.
Bobby Osborne (b. 1931) and Sonny Osborne (b. 1937) were among the first of what might be called “semi-second generation” bluegrass artists; unlike those who preceded them in the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, neither had performed professionally before 1950. By 1954, though, they’d hooked up with Jimmy Martin for a memorable set of recordings, and 1956 found them signed on to MGM on their own. Together with singer-guitarist Red Allen, the Brothers — Bobby singing lead and playing mandolin, Sonny singing baritone and playing banjo — had come up with an inventive new vocal arrangement that put the spotlight pretty much on them alone.
Lest that sound too cold, it should be noted that they deserved it, for not only was Bobby a formidable lead singer and Sonny brilliant in the support role, but their fearless, try-anything (the two recorded separately with avant-garde jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton in the mid-’60s) instrumental skills were profoundly original. The Brothers joined the Grand Ole Opry and signed with Decca Records in 1964, and spent the next decade fusing bluegrass and country in a way that eventually earned them a CMA Vocal Group award. Irascible, opinionated, and both artistically and commercially successful, the Osborne Brothers were at the forefront of the music until Sonny’s 2005 retirement — and while Bobby continues to perform to this day, the influence of their duo continues to grow, too.
East Tennessee native Jimmy Martin (b. 1927) hungered to perform with Bill Monroe as a youngster, then got his chance in 1949 when Mac Wiseman quit the Blue Grass Boys. As lead vocalist and guitarist, he helped to make some of Monroe’s most memorable recordings, then partnered in various settings with Bobby and Sonny Osborne before taking the helm of his Sunny Mountain Boys in the mid-1950s. A brash, colorful guy who could boast with the best and then back it up, Martin served in the cast of the Louisiana Hayride (alongside Elvis) and the Wheeling (W.V.) Jamboree before a growing bluegrass festival circuit threw him a lifeline in the absence of a Grand Ole Opry membership.
Among early Hall of Fame inductees, he may be considered more influential than most of his peers. Service in his Sunny Mountain Boys constituted the training ground for several generations of musicians, from banjo man J.D. Crowe to newgrass pioneer Alan Munde to Americana favorite Greg Garing — and his appearance on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken was legendary. Martin was an unstoppable force of nature who knew exactly what he wanted from a musician, yet was unable to clearly explain it. Still, he did well enough that his records are instantly recognizable, even when you’ve never heard them before.
Pictured above, first row (L to R): Bill Monroe, The Osborne Brothers, Mac Wiseman, Jim & Jesse; Second row: Reno & Smiley, The Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, Flatt & Scruggs
Artist:Big Country Bluegrass Hometown: Independence, Virginia Song: “Keep On Going” (written by Red Allen) Album:Mountains, Mamas and Memories Release Date: February 22, 2019 Label: Rebel Records
In Their Words: “’Keep On Going’ appealed to me and my wife Teresa immediately upon hearing it. Red Allen has always been one of my favorite bluegrass lead singers, and when we heard Scotty Stoneman’s fiddling on the original County Records recording, we were hooked. Scotty was part of the Stoneman Family, who were from our neck of the woods here in Southwest Virginia, and his fiddling along with Porter Church’s banjo playing really filled out the song so well. I asked our guitar player Eddie Gill to listen to the song, and when the band cut it in the studio, I was really pleased!” — Tommy Sells
“The lyrics, and the picking and singing stood out, and it was almost like the song was a blueprint of how good bluegrass music should sound.” — Eddie Gill
If roots music has such a thing as a Renaissance man, there’s surely no stronger contender for the title than Jim Lauderdale. Some artists find a furrow and plow it deep, but Lauderdale has spent the better part of a lifetime ranging with abandon through enough fields to leave most of us out of breath just thinking about it. He’s a legit hit country songwriter; the recipient of an Americana Music Association award for lifetime achievement; a creditable actor who portrayed George Jones in a country music play; the regular host for Music City Roots, a long-running musical variety show; and an artist who’s written and recorded a long list of works ranging from Beatles-esque pop to rhythm & blues to old-school country, and appeared with an equally long list of masterful practitioners of them all.
But Jim Lauderdale is also a bluegrass guy—and not only because he’s recorded bluegrass albums with Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys, as well as a half-dozen or so on his own. The North Carolina native discovered the music while still in his teens, then immersed himself (starting with learning to play banjo) deeply enough that he can still speak with facility about a surprising number of the obscure records and regional acts that lurked behind the obvious attraction of marquee names like Stanley’s.
As he did so, he became acquainted with the music of our Artist of the Month, Roland White—and, as he related in this recent conversation, that led to making a 1979 album that just this summer finally saw the light of day. The appearance of Jim Lauderdale & Roland White (Yep Roc) is like a nifty little message from the past, reminding us of, among other things, the way that a kind heart and a welcoming attitude can shape not only our own lives, but those of others. Roland White was a hero to Jim Lauderdale in his youth, and he’s still a hero to Jim today. Let him tell you all about it….
You’ve told me that when you moved to Nashville in 1979, you had some goals in mind.
My two goals were to hang out with George Jones and Roland White—out of anybody in the world, those two guys.
Why was Roland on your radar?
Because of the Kentucky Colonels—well, the Kentucky Colonels, and then shortly thereafter, Rounder Records put out that album of the White Brothers in Sweden. And then there was a Kentucky Colonels live record that came out, too. It was one of those things—I was playing banjo, and just a little bit of guitar, and I knew I’d never be able to play like Clarence White, but there was just something about Roland. He had so much soul to him, but he was still very understated. And then he put out that solo album, I Wasn’t Born To Rock’n’Roll.
So when I came here, I went to the Station Inn and saw him, and introduced myself and started up a conversation. He was just so nice and let me sit in. I started doing that more and more—going to the Station Inn any time he’d play—and he was just such a warm guy and really made me feel at ease. I was kind of nervous because he was kind of an iconic figure to me.
And then he said, “Come by the house sometime.” So I went by and we just jammed. One time—and I’ll never forget this, it might have been the first time I went to his house—I knocked on the door and hollered and he said, “Come on in, I’m back here in the music room.” So I went in, and there was this piano player playing on a record, and I said, “Who’s that?” He said, “That’s Thelonious Monk.” And I thought, well, I’ve heard of this guy, but I’ve never heard him.
And Roland, I’m sure his musical tastes and palate go way beyond what you can even imagine, yet in his style, he keeps things close to the vest. But also his singing, too, it’s got a real soulfulness about it. It’s just right, just like his playing. I think his playing is very unique and very adventurous, but always very tasteful.
That makes perfect sense, because Monk’s music has a lot of spaces in it, and Roland does that, too. So how’d you guys hatch this scheme of making this record?
Well, to begin with, I said to Roland that I’d like to do a demo of this new song I wrote called “Lazy Boy.” And I said I’d like to do a version of “I’m Gonna Sleep With One Eye Open” and “Ocean Of Diamonds.” So we went in with and cut those three songs.
I had worked one summer—I think it was after my freshman year in college—at Busch Gardens. I was in a bluegrass band that they kind of put together, and there was another band, too, called the Wahoo Revue. Stan Brown was the banjo player in that band, and then Gene Wooten was the Dobro player, and there was another guy who played bass named Gary Bailey. And when I came to Nashville for those five months, Gary and Gene were both playing with Wilma Lee Cooper, and I was roommates with them. So we cut those three songs with Stan and Gene, and Terry Smith playing bass, and Blaine Sprouse playing fiddle.
I couldn’t get anything going here publishing-wise at the time, and I didn’t know what to do, really, as far as trying to get a record deal went. To me, country music was Hank Williams, George Jones, Merle Haggard—those big Mt. Rushmore guys—Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn—and in my mind, bluegrass goes right in there. They went hand in hand, like a brother and sister kind of thing. But even at that time, in 1979, there was a poppish element to the country charts that I wasn’t familiar with. So I just didn’t fit in and I couldn’t get anything going. And so the highlight for me, the huge highlight of my time in Nashville, was hanging out with Roland.
And I think it was Roland who suggested, “Well hey, why don’t we go in the studio and do a whole thing?” We already had those guys, but I guess Blaine wasn’t around, or maybe Roland just decided to get Johnny Warren to play fiddle. So we did it at what was then Scruggs Studio, in Earl’s basement. His son Steve engineered and Roland produced. And Earl would come down every day with a silver tray, and china, and coffee, and he was wearing an apron—it was just surreal. He was the nicest guy in the world, too, but I was still very tongue-tied.
And I remember the first day I went there, too, Red Allen was sitting there in the room, and that also made me nervous. But he just hung out for a little while. It was pretty low-key; we got a lot done pretty quick. And then there were some things that weren’t going to have banjo on them, and Roland said, “How would you feel about Marty Stuart coming and playing lead?” And I thought, great, because I’d seen Marty with Lester and Roland when I was 15. I thought he was the coolest guy, and he was real nice, too.
It’s an interesting set of songs, with a couple of originals. By that point, how long had you been writing?
I had been writing about four years, but I didn’t have too many bluegrass songs under my belt. “Forgive and Forget,” I wrote that fall before we went in, and the same with the other original, “Regrets and Mistakes.”
They were written with the record in mind?
Oh, yeah. And then Roland suggested some of the covers I did. Two that I wanted to do were Kentucky Colonels songs: “I Might Take You Back Again” and “(That’s What You Get) For Loving Me,” which was a cover they used to do. And I brought in the song “Gold and Silver,” which was a George Jones song. But Roland had the more interesting covers, like Donovan’s “Catch the Wind,” and “February Snow” that Lester Flatt had recorded.
As soon as I heard “Forgive and Forget,” I thought, that’s one of Jim’s. So even at that early point, you were developing something distinctive as a writer. Were you writing a lot at the time?
I was. I guess I was writing more country stuff, and more stuff of what we would now call Americana, but kind of a mixture. And even back then, if I did a solo gig, I’d bring my banjo and do some bluegrass; I played dobro a little bit, too, and I’d do some stuff on that, and some guitar stuff, and even some blues harmonica stuff. It was kind of eclectic.
So what happened then?
Well, we did the record, and then I left Nashville about a week later, and oddly enough, of all places to go, I chose New York City. But when I left, I had some cassettes of the record, and I sent them to the major bluegrass labels, with a very sloppily-written cover letter introducing myself, saying I’d like to be on your label. And every label wrote back and said, “Thanks, we like the record, but you’re an unknown, you’re not on the bluegrass circuit. Stay in touch and let us know what you’re doing over the years.” So that really bummed me out. I thought, this was it—this fantasy to record with Roland White and those guys had happened, and people don’t want it. So I kind of shelved it.
Eventually, I ended up in Los Angeles, and I finally got a country record deal. And the first one to come out was in 1991. So I contacted Roland and I said hey, I think now somebody’s going to want to put this thing out that we did. And he said, “Well, that’s great—you’ve got the master, right?” And I said, “I thought you had it.” So it was lost until he was at the Station Inn last year, and as he was leaving the stage, he said, “Oh, by the way, my wife found a tape at the bottom of a box that has our name on it.”
So Diane [Bouska] finds this tape, and they get it in some kind of listenable form…When was the last time before that that you had listened to the record?
It had probably been since 1980. I’d listened to it and I remember playing it for my grandmother in Lexington, Virginia. But I was so heartbroken that we couldn’t get a deal that it was hard to listen to, because I knew nothing was happening with it at that time. And then I misplaced the cassette I had. So it had been close to 39 years.
What did you think?
I was pleasantly surprised. It brought back so many memories, and just how much I loved the record when we made it—and how much I love it now.
Artist: Bobby Osborne Song: “They Called the Wind Maria” (originally from the 1951 Broadway musical, Paint Your Wagon) Album:Original
Where did you first hear this song?
The first ones I ever heard do it were the Browns — Jim Ed and Maxine Brown. I kind of liked it then, but my brother and me didn’t want to cover it right then. It’s been a long time ago since I heard it. This project that Alison [Brown] came up with, with me and Compass Records, I thought about that song. My son and me were trying to get some songs together so we put it down on the list. The chord progression on it and the song itself, I’ve always really liked it. Of course, the Browns did a great job with the recording they had on it. I never did hear anybody else, maybe I didn’t listen, but I didn’t hear anybody else do it.
When I put it down on the list, Alison wrote me back, she said, “That was one that I wanted you to do!” [Laughs] So that turned out real good. Then I had to learn the thing, then. The melody and the harmony and all that on it. To me, it was just right down my alley.
What about the song made you think it would be such a great fit for bluegrass?
Well, it’s different from what most people would do, I think, in the story of it. A lot of people nowadays are doing arrangements like that, something similar to the way the melody and the harmony goes with that song. A lot of people are doing stuff that they didn’t do back when the Browns did it. If you went into a key that wasn’t just G, C, and D, you lost a lot of people, way back then. Nowadays, why, it’s not unusual at all.
My brother and me did some things — I don’t know if we were the first or not — but a lot of people in country music were doing that [sort of a thing]. But, as far as bluegrass goes, most of the time it was just plain Monroe-type music, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers. A lot of folks didn’t go to those keys — what I always called it, the off-keys — with the melody of a song. My brother and I, we got tied in with that harmony we’d come up with and the endings that we had, everything just fit right into the melody of “Maria.” I was really familiar with that type of thing.
Fans might think, “He’s changed that around. I don’t like that kind of music.” But the song was written like that, so you can’t deny that. It fit us so good. Alison said it was always one of her favorite songs, too. Her being the producer, she asked me to do that, and it just tickled me to death. The more we worked with it, the better it got. It turned out to be a great recording.
You and your brother have always covered non-bluegrass songs throughout your career, and it’s kind of a tradition in bluegrass to take songs from outside the genre and repurpose them for bluegrass. Why do you think this is a tradition and why have you always made a point of recording these types of songs throughout your career?
You remember the song, “Once More”?
Yeah, of course!
We were doing just plain bluegrass, you know, Monroe-type and Flatt & Scruggs. Just G, C, D, bluegrass — three chords to it. Well, we were up in West Virginia, and a man up there by the name of Dusty Owens had a band and he had written that song, “Once More.” He had recorded it on a little label up there. He gave me one of the copies of it and, when I listened to it, I felt that would be a great thing for us to do with the harmony that we had. When we first recorded it for MGM Records, they were strictly [having us record] three-chord bluegrass.
I got the words to “Once More.” We had a couple hundred miles to drive home from Wheeling, and Red Allen was with us at the time — it was just three of us. We got to singing it just like we would normally do any other song, but there was just something missing with it. Of course, we were just doing regular harmony singing then. We had never featured a high lead on a thing in the world. My voice being the type that it was, it was made for high lead. We were just sitting in the car driving along. We didn’t have any instruments or nothing. We were just trying to learn the song. All of a sudden, I don’t know, I started singing the lead in a way-up-higher register. Red Allen was a tenor singer when he came to work with us, so he just started singing the tenor, but then it was the low part. My brother was good on the parts and chimed right in with the middle part and, boy, when we got to singing it like that, we knew right there we had run into some kind of harmony that we had never heard before. We had 200 miles to go and we sang that song all the way home so that we wouldn’t forget what we had learned. That’s how we came across that type of harmony.
When we went to Nashville to record again, we were dead set on putting that on a record, because that was brand new and it was different from Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and all that. It was so different from anybody. Wesley Rose was the A&R guy for MGM at that time, so we approached him with that type of harmony, and he looked at us and said, “You can’t do that. That’s some other kind of music and harmony besides bluegrass.” We had a talk and talk and talk. He said, “You put something like that out after what you’ve already done, you’re liable to lose your recording contract.” We were so set on it we said, “We’ll just take a chance on it, if you don’t care.”
When we recorded it, we had been using everything regular bluegrass people used — fiddle, mandolin, guitar, banjo, and bass. We figured the snare drum was perfect with bluegrass. We went back to [Wesley] and said we wanted to add dobro and drop the fiddle. Well, he had a fit over that, too. We hesitated to mention that there was one thing we’d like to do with the rhythm on it, the snare drum, but just the brushes. The guy says, “You’re getting completely away from bluegrass!” Well, no. It’s just going to match our singing. We finally talked our way into him letting us do “Once More” just like the recording is now. He was not happy with that at all.
Well, we all know how that turned out!
[Laughs] Back then, I think it was on the top 40 country, I believe. It made number 15 or 16 on the charts. We never heard another word out of Wesley. [Laughs] That right there led us into going deeper and deeper into that kind of harmony. It became our trademark.
What’s your favorite thing about performing “They Called the Wind Maria”?
I kind of like the hesitation between each line, you know? I like that because we were kind of used to that kind of thing and changing from one key to another. That’s one of the main things that really took the song off with me. The hesitation between each set of two lines. Then the tune of it, the melody to the song. When we put the three parts to it, it really dressed it up and made it even different from what the Browns did.
Now you know that ain’t bluegrass, right?
Well, after what me and my brother have done, there’s not much we can say to argue with what anyone thought! [Laughs] People still ask us about it.
When we switched from MGM to Decca Records, Owen Bradley was the producer over there. He knew about us and he latched onto [what we were doing] in a hurry. He said, “Do what you want to do. You know more about what you want to do than I do.” We got a taste of country to go along with the bluegrass, and he went right along with us. It really worked out pretty good. When we were allowed to just do what we wanted to with the harmony, the instrumentation, and the lyrics to the songs, when we got into that, it became a standard thing for the Osborne Brothers. A lot of other people jumped on that type of harmony in a hurry. It became a standard thing about every one of them wanted to do.
I love that on your latest record, Original, you’re carrying on that tradition of doing songs that some people might not expect to be on a bluegrass record.
Oh yeah, that was a thing we knew [from the begining] with one playing the banjo and one playing the mandolin and singing [in the Osborne Brothers]. There’s no way we’d ever get away from the sound of bluegrass instruments. What we had in mind was to play those instruments and make them fit with what we were doing. We were putting bluegrass and country music right together, and people just loved it. Our harmony singing fit bluegrass and country music, both. In one sense of the phrase, we had it made right there.
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