"We were getting to the age to where we could tell who was playing what and how and why. Bobby and I, we really started to hone in on that harmony thing. Because I could look at him and I knew what he was doing, and he could do the same thing."
Of all the Bear Family boxed sets in my collection, none spend more time in my CD player than the two that cover 18 years of recordings made by Bobby and Sonny, the Osborne Brothers. Though not all bluegrass fans are Osborne Brothers fans -- their use of drums, pedal steel guitar, electrified instruments and even strings on literally hundreds of recordings made them among the most controversial acts ever to work the bluegrass circuit - they have had an incalculable influence on bluegrass. As Bluegrass Unlimited reviewer Art Menius put it when the first Osbornes boxed set appeared in 1996, the Brothers "provided a bridge not only from the first generation [of bluegrass] to the second, but onward to the third as well" -- an accomplishment exceeded only by the beauty and power of the music itself.
Their earliest years are the stuff of legend. Born in Hyden, Kentucky (Bobby in 1931, Sonny in 1937), the two moved with their family to Dayton, Ohio, during World War II. Both gravitated to the music business while still boys. "Music was the only thing that we cared anything about," Sonny says emphatically. "We didn't want to be farmers, and we didn't want to be anything. Just music was the only thing that we wanted to do, that's it."
They did it, too. By the time Bobby went into the Marines in 1951 - he spent two years in Korea, nearly dying there - he had recorded with the well-established Lonesome Pine Fiddlers and with Jimmy Martin, then coming off his first stint with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. Martin had a hand, too, in Sonny's spectacular start as a bluegrass musician, taking the 14-year old banjo player with him for the summer when he went back to work for Monroe in 1952. Sonny returned to the Blue Grass Boys the following spring, dropping out of school for good and remaining with Monroe until Bobby was mustered out in the fall. "I know one thing, I grew up in a hurry," Sonny says. They moved together to Knoxville, Tennessee, marking November 6, 1953, as the beginning of their partnership.
The next two and a half years found the Osbornes in and out of steady musical work. They partnered up again with Martin, who had left Monroe's band for good; the trio moved to Detroit, making appearances on TV and radio and, in 1954, laying down their first major-label recordings - six sides for RCA. "That's where music started really becoming important," Sonny remembers, "and all of us, we were getting to the age to where we could tell who was playing what and how and why. Bobby and I, we really started to hone in on that harmony thing. Because I could look at him and I knew what he was doing, and he could do the same thing. It became easy for us.
"And Jimmy wasn't that quick with harmony, but Jimmy's a...I'll tell you about Jimmy Martin. I don't get along with him -- I don't stand for anything that Jimmy stands for right now, I just don't - but at that time there was nobody, nobody on earth better than Jimmy Martin. Jimmy was the best rhythm guitar player and lead singer that this music will ever know at that period right there. Man, it was something else to play with him, it was something else."
Despite their manifest talent, the trio couldn't work together for long, and the Brothers returned to Dayton, taking day jobs for a while before joining forces with powerful singer/guitarist Red Allen and fiddler Art Stamper, a veteran of the Stanley Brothers' Clinch Mountain Boys. "Bobby and me and Art Stamper and Red, we got in Tommy Sutton's basement - Tommy was a disc jockey in Dayton - without a bass player, and we cut four or five songs," says Sonny. "'Ruby' [a song Bobby had been singing for years since first hearing it as a youth in Hyden] was one of them. We paid Tommy's train fare to Nashville; I think $50 is what we gave him for train fare, hotel, eating, his whole trip down there. That's all we had. And son of a gun, he got us a recording contract with MGM, and 'Ruby' was what sold it."
The Osborne Brothers And Red Allen made their first records for MGM on July 1, 1956; not surprisingly, "Ruby" was among them, and though it didn't chart, it was a big seller and jukebox favorite in the band's home region, earning them a spot on WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, home of one of the major country shows, the Wheeling Jamboree. The first recording to feature twin banjos, with Sonny playing a perfectly-matched tenor to Bob's lead on the breaks, "Ruby" was a driving number; Bobby's high voice soared over the ebb and flow of the banjos and session bassist Ernie Newton's walking bass line with a haunting cry, while the reverb-laden a cappella ending expertly blended the trio's voices into a single, rich sound. Still, it wasn't until 1958 that the Brothers hit the charts; when they did, it was with a song that would set the stage for the rest of their careers and, though the process took years, permanently alter the sound of bluegrass. The song was "Once More".
FINDING THEIR VOICES
"Bobby and I got to thinking, you know, why don't we get somebody, get Red to sing the low harmony part, you [Bobby] sing the high lead and I'll sing under you. That way, no matter who sings the low part, we'll always sound the same. And I think that was the big secret right there, the big answer, I guess, to our success.
"Once More" is what used to be called a heart song. Written and recorded for a regional label by fellow Jamboree cast member Dusty Owens, it's a lovely creation in its own right, and it was the perfect candidate for a new vocal treatment the Brothers wanted to try out. Though appreciating the beauty of a high lead arrangement requires no explanation, understanding it does.
Bluegrass harmony, like most country harmony of the time, was built around a lead or melody line by adding a part called the tenor that generally followed the shape of the melody at the next highest harmonic interval. The combination produced the classic duet sound heard in countless country recordings of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. When a third voice was added to produce a trio, it took the baritone part, which mirrored the tenor's role by following the lead at the next lower harmonic interval. Earlier editions of Monroe's band had recorded some trios, but the arrangement was permanently established, at least in bluegrass, by Bill Monroe (tenor), Lester Flatt (lead) and Earl Scruggs (baritone) in the Blue Grass Boys' Columbia recordings of 1946 and 1947, and it was quickly adopted by other groups. With few exceptions, that arrangement - melody, a part above and a part below - was the rule when it came to bluegrass trios; for the most part it worked quite nicely, and still does, producing a sound notably richer than the duet vocal.
A problem, however, arises when the primary singer in a band also has the highest voice. There's no one to sing the tenor above, so the lead singer must jump to the tenor part on a chorus, with another singer taking over on the melody. If the song is pitched in a key that's comfortable for the lead singer in the verses, there's a good chance that he'll be hard-pressed to sing the tenor; if the song is pitched to where he's comfortable singing the tenor, his voice may bottom out on the verses.
Bobby Osborne is a one-of-a-kind singer - "there's no limit to what he could do, and he was the best that ever was at what he did," Sonny accurately notes - and it was obvious that his vocals were the centerpiece of the band's sound. But, as Sonny once told an interviewer, "he was having to strain his voice to sing the low parts for a lead and then go into a natural register to sing the tenor." That wasn't a problem when Red was singing the lead, but on the other hand, having another lead singer diluted the focus on the Brothers, and on Bobby in particular, and it made them uncomfortably reliant on a third party.
Sonny recalls how they came across the solution. "Bobby and I got to thinking, you know, why don't we get somebody, get Red to sing the low harmony part, you [Bobby] sing the high lead and I'll sing under you. That way, no matter who sings the low part, we'll always sound the same. And I think that was the big secret right there, the big answer, I guess, to our success. Because we've always sounded the same, and that's strictly because Bobby's part is always dominant."
Though the high lead trio would become a staple of the Osborne Brothers' sound, it was enhanced by a savvy, creative flexibility that made the most of every opportunity. "Singing harmony is all in knowing why you're doing things," Sonny says. "It's not just making a note match, it's knowing why you do that note. Why do you go from this note to that note and the other guy stays where he is -- it's knowing why, that's the main part of that. See, what we always did, we never did follow any kind of pattern with that harmony thing. We always figured you've got three lines and it's gotta be harmony. It didn't matter who sang them. Whoever could get the best tone out of a note, that's who went to that note, and so we switched parts constantly all through a song, we just continually switched parts."
THE BUSINESS OF BLUEGRASS
"[Doyle Wilburn] had gotten us a guest appearance scheduled for that coming Saturday on the Opry, he had booked us to do some Armed Services radio shows on Sunday before we came back to Dayton, we were going to sign with their publishing company, which was Sure-Fire Music, and their booking agency, which was Wil-Helm Agency. He did that in a period of three or four days, and this was more than we'd been able to do in six months."
The innovations of the high lead trio and the related development of sophisticated approaches to harmony were the centerpiece of the Osborne Brothers sound henceforth, but they weren't the only components.
On the instrumental front, Bobby and Sonny were also blazing new trails. Bobby developed a syncopated, melodic approach to the mandolin derived from the jazz-inflected solos of bluegrass's hottest fiddlers. Sonny played a stunning panorama of styles, from right-hand picking patterns that punched out quirky, inspired variations on classic Earl Scruggs licks to a wholly new chordal sound. The latter was a perfect accompaniment to the country material the Brothers focused on in a series of sessions for MGM over the next five and a half years.
Singer/guitarists came and went. Allen departed in 1958, succeeded by Jimmy Brown Jr. and then the supremely talented Benny Birchfield, who also recorded a half-dozen banjo duets with Sonny. Studio musicians such as guitarist Ray Edenton, bassist Lightnin' Chance and drummer Buddy Harman rounded out the instrumental sound, and occasional guests such as Ira Louvin, Hank Garland, Pete Drake and even (on separate occasions) Rusty and Doug Kershaw chimed in one way or another.
But the focus was now on the Brothers for good, and the sound was therefore consistent and identifiable. It was also brilliant and beautiful, producing such tour de forces as Ira Louvin and Doug Kershaw's "Five Days Of Heaven", Hank Williams' "May You Never Be Alone", and the last cut they recorded for MGM in 1963, Rufus Bridley's "Sweet Thing", on which Bobby's aching, heartsick lead alternated with lush, poignant trios.
Still, though the Brothers had hit their stride musically, they were unhappy with their progress, or lack thereof, in the business. Sonny remembers how they felt by the end of their tenure with the label: "Our career had really come to a standstill. We had records out, but otherwise it was just standing there doing nothing. And we were doing a lot of kind of heavy-duty drinking, and just about everything associated with that.
"We played this place somewhere in Pennsylvania one night, and Bobby and I were laying in the beds in our hotel room, and both of us...it was just on our minds. Bobby had a child by this time, and I had just gotten married - and I said what are we going to do, and Bobby said, I don't know, but we gotta do something. And he said, you know something, Doyle Wilburn one time gave me a card, and I believe I've got it; let me see if I can find it. So he got up and got in his billfold, and sure enough he found that card. I called Doyle -- and this is 2:30, 3:30 in the morning - and Doyle said, do you know what time it is, and I said yup, and just think, where I am it's an hour later from where you are. He said you big SOB, what do you want? And I said, well, you remember a couple of years ago you told Bobby if he wanted a change to call you? Well, we're ready to almost do anything or quit, one or the other. He said, give me until you get home, which was in five days, and let me see what I can round up.
"I called him when we got back. He had gotten us a guest appearance scheduled for that coming Saturday on the Opry, he had booked us to do some Armed Services radio shows on Sunday before we came back to Dayton, we were going to sign with their publishing company, which was Sure-Fire Music, and their booking agency, which was Wil-Helm Agency. He did that in a period of three or four days, and this was more than we'd been able to do in six months. And so a little spark of hope came up."
Doyle and Teddy, the Wilburn Brothers, are little-remembered these days, but in the early 1960s, they were Nashville powerhouses, with a string of Top 10 hits for Decca, their own businesses (including a syndicated TV show that was just getting underway when Sonny made his call), membership in the Grand Ole Opry since 1956, and a lot of credibility as starmakers, having sponsored Loretta Lynn's triumphant entry into Nashville. Their support made a huge difference for the Osborne Brothers, and Sonny remembers Doyle Wilburn with a lot of gratitude.
"We sat in the office and watched him con our way into a Decca record contract. I watched him do it," he recalls. "He called Owen Bradley, and he said, 'I got these guys that are on MGM, and RCA's gonna sign them today. They're good, and if you want them, you can have them, with Decca.' Owen asked who we were and all this stuff, and he said, 'I don't think I'm interested, I don't think they'd be good for the label right now.' And Doyle said, 'Chet [Atkins, at RCA] is gonna sign them this afternoon, he's already said he is.'
"And so as soon as he hung up, Doyle dialed the head of Decca Records in New York. He said 'Sidney, I don't call you direct much, but this is important. I've got some guys sitting right here in my office that RCA is gonna sign this afternoon,' and he said, 'If you want them, you can get them right now, but you're going to have to do something quick.' And so he hung up. And Doyle just sat back and propped his feet up on the counter, and he said, 'We'll just wait a few minutes.'
"Sure enough, about ten minutes went by and the phone rang, and it was Owen Bradley, next door. Owen's office was next door to the Wilburns'. And we listened to Doyle talking to him: 'Owen, how are you?....I'm all right...Yeah, just sitting over here...Yeah, they're still here...OK, yeah, we can come over.' So we went over there, and he played some stuff of ours for Owen, and we signed. We signed right there."
The Decca contract was important to the Osborne Brothers, and so was Grand Ole Opry membership, maybe even more so - and there again, Wilburn was able to help. "We realized that we had to have the Grand Ole Opry to succeed, we couldn't do it without it, there was no way," Sonny says. "Because with the name Grand Ole Opry attached to the end of your name, it just opened so many doors at that time, in the late '50s and '60s, and you could go anywhere and everybody knew what you were then; they'd heard you on the radio...because of that clear-channel radio station.
"I told Doyle, we have to have the Grand Ole Opry, we can't survive without it, and we want to survive. If you can't get us on the Grand Ole Opry, we'll go somewhere else and try. He said 'OK, give me 18 months from right now, and if I can't get you there, you're free to do anything you want to, and you're free from our publishing, everything.' I said that's fair enough. So 13 months later we were members of the Grand Ole Opry. I don't know how he did it, but Doyle would put his finger right in your face and say 'Look, you SOB, this is how it's going to be.' And nine out of ten times -- he told me one time, he said, 'You know what? I've told everybody in Nashville to kiss my a...and you know what, I've made most of them do it.' God, I loved those guys, I still do, too. We owe a lot to them, a whole lot."
THE SUNNY SIDE
"If there's a hole there that I can put notes in, sometimes it'll be in my mind an inch long, or a quarter-inch. Maybe there's room for one note, maybe room for 18 notes. But when you take that stuff, it expands that whole thing. Instead of being an inch wide, it's a foot wide, and instead of being a foot wide, it's a yard wide, and everything you hear will fit into those spaces. I don't know how that happens, but somehow it does."
With the Wilburn Brothers backing them, Bobby and Sonny Osborne headed into a period of remarkable artistic achievement - not so much a matter of progress, though there was that too, but of elaboration on and refinement of what they had already established.
"Things opened up then," Sonny says, "because Teddy Wilburn also knew good songs from bad songs - I mean, he could flat out tell you. And he picked our material, and helped Bobby with his writing, and then the agency booked us. And we got our money up to where it was decent, and by this time, we were also starting - by 1966, then - we were starting to do the festival thing, and it had caught on pretty good, and we were an established name. The agency had us going hard, and we were working country shows and doing pretty good work, with the Grand Ole Opry in back of us. We were really catching on and getting our thing together, and we had our harmony figured out, all that stuff was figured out, and all we had to do then was apply it."
Their first Decca recording session was held on August 21, 1963. Between then and November 16, 1967 - another watershed date in their history - they cut over 40 songs for the label, and virtually every one was a classic. There were folk songs such as "In The Pines" and "The Cuckoo Bird" (which traced its lineage back to the British Isles); more recent ones such as Lead Belly's "Take This Hammer" and "Cotton Fields", and Paul Clayton's "Gotta Travel On"; and old-time and bluegrass favorites such as "Salty Dog Blues", "I Know What It Means To Be Lonesome", Monroe's "Footprints In The Snow", and "Kentucky". There were new songs by the best country and bluegrass writers, including Johnny Russell's "Making Plans" and "I'm Leaving", or Betty Sue Perry's "Hey, Hey Bartender"; and country classics, too, from Ernest Tubb's "Let's Say Goodbye Like We Said Hello" to Bob Wills' anthem, "Faded Love". Most importantly, there were originals, for Bobby Osborne was hitting his stride as a writer, working with everyone from bluegrass' finest, Pete Goble, to his wife Patsy.
Whether the songs were new or old, they became musical gold in the Brothers' hands. The sound they created in the studio was rich and full; drums were used on every session, as was session leader Ray Edenton's guitar. Pedal steel, fiddle and piano were used to fill out the basic band's sound, making it more appealing to the country music audience even as the additions drew the ire of some bluegrass fans.
"See, they thought, 'Oh, they've changed, they did this, they did that, they've changed' - well, we didn't," Sonny insists. "We played the same things we normally played, and we just added this stuff all around us. But we never did lay anything down, we played the same notes, and when we'd go on the road, we'd just play the same notes. And if the steel took a break, I'd take a break on the banjo, and half of them, they didn't know it, all except purists."
Sonny's own playing was, indeed, an important part of the Osborne Brothers sound. Though he could drive a bluegrass tune such as "I'll Be Alright Tomorrow" as well as anyone and better than most, he had developed an astonishing, unique approach to the slower numbers that fit them perfectly. Asked to account for its origins, he laughs.
"Well, for not wanting to sound like a doper - I wasn't - but I took a lot of speed at that time, and I'm not blaming this or crediting this for that, but when you take speed...if there's a hole between words in a song that in your mind is, let's say - and this is the way I see it, and some people don't -- but if there's a hole there that I can put notes in, sometimes it'll be in my mind an inch long, or a quarter-inch. Maybe there's room for one note, maybe room for 18 notes. But when you take that stuff, it expands that whole thing. Instead of being an inch wide, it's a foot wide, and instead of being a foot wide, it's a yard wide, and everything you hear will fit into those spaces. I don't know how that happens, but somehow it does. And a lot of that was due to that.
"The notes themselves came from constantly listening to every other kind of music that you can imagine. Steel guitars and electric guitars, horns, saxophone, trumpet, piano - if you listened to all that stuff, if you were to be a huge fan of the kind of music that I listened to, you'd hear a little bit of everybody in there. There's Pete Drake and there's Buddy Emmons and Buddy Charlton and Leon Rhodes and Hank Garland and Benny Martin - I mean, there's some of everybody in the notes that I played, but when you put them on the banjo, then it's a whole different ball game.
"And on the other hand, too, we only had two lead instruments, and so I had to double like a steel guitar and maybe a fiddle sometimes, and Bobby would double on the mandolin like an electric guitar and fiddle. All that stuff came from the need of having to have fill stuff that didn't sound like what we would normally play. The chords I came up with, they just sounded like they fit what we were singing, they sounded like we sang, and I thought it was important to do that."
Still, despite their instrumental brilliance and hard work, it was the vocals that were at the center of the Osborne Brothers' success. When Benny Birchfield left the band in 1964, the singer/guitarist slot was filled by Missouri native Dale Sledd, who remained with them into the 1970s. The stability of the trio enabled an almost psychic unity among the singers, and listening to the recordings they made, one can believe they could do anything they wanted. Whether it was elaborate part-switching, unusual and harmonically sophisticated chords, traditional trios in the mold of Bill Monroe's classic lineup, or soulful, open-throated wails, their vocals rang out with an almost supernatural intensity.
The Brothers' superlative talent and self-confidence eventually communicated itself to the men who had nominal control over their work in the studio. "Harry Silverstein at Decca would try to produce us, and he didn't know what we were doing," Sonny recalled. "He was trying to do the country mentality to us, and we recognized it. We did what we wanted to do, but we tried to let Harry think it was more his idea than anything else. Owen Bradley finally one day just told him, he said, 'Harry, why don't you just sit in there and leave them alone. They know what they're doing, and we neither one don't, and you know that.' "So from that point on, we produced ourselves. And Decca gave us a free hand, boy, and that's hard for a record label that big to do that. But we were selling; at that time everything we did sold about 40,000 copies. Every single we did, every album we did, sold about 40,000 copies, and when you did that, they left you alone. You proved your point."
The point was driven home in the aftermath of their November 16, 1967, session. The day before the session, Sonny stopped by the home of songwriter Boudleaux Bryant. The two men had known each other long before Bryant and his wife Felice had connected with the Everly Brothers to supply many of the Everlys' classic songs, having met at Bobby's 1952 recording session with Bill Monroe, when Bryant had been brought in to sing bass on "Walking In Jerusalem". Bobby and Sonny had recorded several Bryant songs for MGM, but none since.
Still, Sonny asked if Bryant had anything. The songwriter hauled out a number that still wasn't quite finished and offered it to the Osbornes. "He played it, and I said hey, it'll do, it'll be fine. I called Bobby; Bobby came over and he liked it. I told Boudleaux that we were going to rehearse in the morning, and then record in the afternoon, and I said if you can get it over there to us and where we can understand what's on the tape, then we'll do it. It was that simple. And so he brought it over about 9:30 the next morning, and Bobby and Dale Sledd and I worked it out and went that afternoon and recorded it."
The song was "Rocky Top".
OVER THE TOP
"We'd go to record, and sometimes we'd have 14, 15 guys in the studio. We got to the point where they believed in us so much we'd just see how many people we could get. We had two steel guitars on one thing, and oh, it was just unreal -- but gracious, there was some neat music there, and boy, Bobby was singing. You should have seen him when he was at his best.
Sonny remembers that Doyle and Teddy Wilburn were unpleasantly surprised when the Brothers ran through "Rocky Top" prior to rolling the tape; it wasn't published by their company, Sure-Fire, so they had never heard it and didn't stand to gain from it. "Doyle said, 'Who OK'd you to do this'? I said nobody, Doyle, but it's a good bluegrass song, I just thought we'd do this. He said, 'Well, I won't be responsible for this, period.' I said, you don't have to, you know, we're going to do the song, period, I told Boudleaux we were going to do it, and we're going to do it. I didn't know it was a big thing.
"He left, and we did it. It was released on Christmas Day of 1967, and in 10 days - I wish I could remember the figures - I think it was 85,000 copies in the first 10 days it was released. And our contract was up, you see, at the end of the year. Decca didn't tell us anything about that, you see, until we'd signed that damned contract. And then they told us, 'Oh, man, we've got a hit.' Hell yes, we'd got a hit. But that's politics too, and every time one of these things would happen, I learned a little bit, and Bobby learned a little bit. And we learned to be bitter, and we learned to have a chip on our shoulders, and we learned that all was not as it appeared."
In the meantime, the Osborne Brothers continued to produce masterpiece after masterpiece for the label. In the wake of the success of "Rocky Top", they cut more Bryant songs; Bobby continued to write, too, and the songs pitched to them got even better, even as their arrangements grew more elaborate. "We'd go to record, and sometimes we'd have 14, 15 guys in the studio," Sonny recalls with a chuckle. "We got to the point where they believed in us so much we'd just see how many people we could get. We had two steel guitars on one thing, and oh, it was just unreal -- but gracious, there was some neat music there, and boy, Bobby was singing. You should have seen him when he was at his best. There just wasn't anything like it, nothing like it. There's no limit to what he could do, and he was the best that ever was at what he did.
"I love strings, and so we got to thinking, well, why not? We'd done everything else and they'd stood still for it, so why not? And we had experimented around where the steel guitar was using some kind of phase shifter or fuzz tone or something, and it sounded like strings. So we used this on some song, and Owen Bradley came out, and he said, 'You know what, I hate to hear you do that; if you're going to do that, why don't you get strings and do it.' I said go get 'em, my friend, go get 'em. We'll pay for them, that's all right. So he did. He got about half the Nashville Symphony, and they came out with all their sheets and all this stuff and they did four songs with us. If it was a challenge to us, then we'd try it; we'd kill ourselves to do it. And we did, so we did it for about two years, and we proved our point, and so we stopped doing that."
In those years, they covered Charlie Louvin and Dolly Parton, Hank Williams and George Jones, the Wilburn Brothers and Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and Tom T. Hall. In 1971, they won the CMA's Vocal Group Of The Year award; in '73, they were invited to perform at the White House, the first bluegrass group ever to appear there. They opened shows for Merle Haggard for four years, eventually leading the country legend to hire away from them the young man who had replaced Dale Sledd in the third singer's chair, Ronnie Reno. The Osborne Brothers were, by a considerable margin, the most popular and successful bluegrass act of the era.
Then, in 1974, at the high point of their career, they left Decca Records.
"We quit, we just flat out quit," says Sonny. "They had a housecleaning is what they did, and they released a whole bunch of people, but we were still pretty healthy, and they wanted us to sign a five-year contract with a five-year extension. And we'd never signed an extension - never, not one. So I said no, we aren't going to do that. Bobby didn't want to do it either. So we got down to a three-year contract with a three-year clause in it. And I said no, I'm not going to sign that extra three years, because I'm not going to allow you guys to tie us up where we can't record if you don't want to release us. I said, here's the deal: We sign three years, you release everything that we record within three months after we record it. And they wouldn't do it. So I said, the next thing you can do is get us a signed release, then, and they did. They wanted to be bad boys, so we just bought our unissued masters back from them, got our release and left."
With the exception of a one-off live album made for RCA a short while later, the Osbornes never recorded for a major label again. Instead, they signed a deal with California's CMH Records and continued to produce masterful albums, including three double LPs - one with Mac Wiseman, one composed entirely of songs by Felice & Boudleaux Bryant, and one revisiting the classics of their youth and early days (Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers and more). Defying expectations, the new versions were even stronger than the originals.
Though their new work was strong, the Osborne Brothers were beginning to relax, helped by the financial security of their publishing company, which owned the rights to some important songs, including Paul Craft's "Midnight Flyer", which had been picked up by country-rock megasellers the Eagles. In 1982, Bobby underwent quintuple-bypass heart surgery, and as he returned to performing, their music reflected the less frenzied pace his health demanded.
In 1984, they signed with independent label Sugar Hill and recorded, among other albums, two sets of their best-loved songs in a stripped-down, more acoustic format. "We did that because we thought MCA was going to stop making the Best Of The Osborne Brothers cassette," Sonny remembers, "so we thought, well, we'll go in and redo all of them while we're still singing good, and we had better cuts on some of them than we had on the originals. I loved that stuff we did with Sugar Hill, and we've got that into a CD, and I think that's important, because now the quality of it will never deteriorate."
GRIN AND BEAR IT
"It helped us, our credibility, tremendously, because you know, anybody that is somebody has got Bear Family. If you don't have Bear Family you didn't make it, it's just almost that simple."
The 1990s have seen the Osborne Brothers, once the willing center of bluegrass controversy, transformed into elder statesmen of the music. They continue to make regular appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and at festivals and venues around the country. "Rocky Top" was adopted as an official state song of Tennessee in 1982; a remixed version of the tune, with heavy dance beats and dub-style editing, came out in 1996 and was a surprise hit in urban dance clubs, selling well enough to earn an extended stay on the Billboard Country Singles sales chart.
The Osbornes were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Hall of Honor in 1994, and 1996 saw the release of their first Bear Family box set, with the second following the next year. "I didn't want to do that," Sonny laughs, "I did not want them to do that. Because it just depletes your whole thing, you know. But I was wrong; it didn't hurt anything, and as a matter of fact it might have helped. It helped us, our credibility, tremendously, because you know, anybody that is somebody has got Bear Family. If you don't have Bear Family you didn't make it, it's just almost that simple."
Since 1994, the Osborne Brothers have recorded for Florida's Pinecastle label. Most of their current band - singer/guitarist Terry Eldredge, bassist Terry Smith, dobro player Gene Wooten - has been with them since then; Dana Cupp, Bill Monroe's last banjo player, joined a couple years ago to play guitar and fill in on banjo and mandolin when Sonny or Bobby are unable to appear, and fiddler David Crow was recently replaced by Shad Cobb.
In 1998, they released Hyden, the first in a series of CDs billed as a document of their career. The second is due out shortly; tentatively entitled Dayton To Knoxville, 1949-1954, it includes songs from the Louvin Brothers, Johnny & Jack, and Flatt & Scruggs, as well as other numbers popular on the radio during their youthful days in those cities. Underlining the album's retrospective character is the appearance of "Don't You Hear Jerusalem Mourn" and "Across The Sea Blues", recorded by Bobby Osborne and Jimmy Martin as demos when they were pursuing their recording contract with King Records in 1950. They're thinking of bringing back some of their old studio pickers for the next one, "just to make a couple of songs with them," Sonny says.
"Recording-wise, we just kind of do what we want to. We're not led by anything, nobody forces us to do anything. Business is fun right now, but we've cut way back on dates. I just don't want to be out there doing that any more, not that much."
ND contributing editor Jon Weisberger lives in Kenton County, Kentucky, and tries to avoid rigid distinctions between bluegrass and country music.
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