The Osborne Brothers
1956-1968
Bear Family BCD 15598
(four CD set)

Review for Bluegrass Unlimited by Art Menius

"In Nashville it’s called ‘The Muleskinner.’ I’d like to do this for Bob Osborne. He’s here tonight visiting," Bill Monroe told the audience for the audience for the Blue Grass Boys’ set at Carlton Haney’s 1966 Blue Grass Festival near Roanoke, Virginia. "He’ll be working here, I guess, maybe tomorrow night. Of course, his little brother Sonny’s along, too."

By that Labor Day the Osborne Brothers, Decca labelmates of Monroe and Jimmy Martin, stood little more than a year away from scaling the commercial peak called "Rocky Top." Already members of the Grand Ole Opry, Sonny and Bob were just past midway in a remarkable 15 year run where they, along with the Country Gentlemen, defined the bleeding edge of bluegrass music.

The release of this magisterial four-CD set by Bear Family provides the perfect opportunity to reassess the stunning first decade plus two of bluegrass music’s most under-appreciated superstars. During the few years covered here the Osbornes introduced the high lead style that would revolutionize bluegrass trios, Sonny evolved from a Scruggs clone to an irrepressibly innovative banjo stylist, and Bobby, himself fully capable of replicating Monroe, distinguished himself with a fiddle-note approach that has influenced three generations of mandolinists. They brought drums, the electric bass, and material by Nashville’s leading songwriters to bluegrass.

The Osborne Brothers merely set the stage for the sound of bluegrass music for the past twenty-five years. They provided a bridge not only from the first generation to the second, but onward to the third as well. When you’re out in front you’re going to get some arrows in your back. Sometimes they’re deserved, often they are the slings and arrows of outrageous jealously. Neil Rosenberg has noted how by the mid-1960s both Flatt & Scruggs and the Osborne Brothers seemed "too commercial" to many fans. That attitude has unfairly diminished the luster of these Bluegrass Hall of Honor inductees. A journey through this collection reinforces how much the Osborne Brothers accomplished, suggests how they have shaped bluegrass today, and helps understand some aspects of the controversies surrounding their accomplishments.

Bear Family facilitates this process with both fabulous sounding CD’s and their standard and its lovely and informative, 24 page oversized booklet. Written by Rosenberg and Eddie Stubbs, it traces the recordings session by session and provides a detailed discography compiled with Bobby’s assistance. Lavishly illustrated with color and B&W shots, it does display Bear Family’s Achilles heel of typos. That, and the absence of images of the original LP jackets, prove minor blemishes on this magnificent package. The music can speak for itself, anyway.

Bobby once explained to Bill Emerson for Muleskinner News how they managed to sign with the major MGM during the early days of rock ’n’ roll. "We met Tommy Sutton who was a DJ at WONE in Dayton and he made an audition tape and carried it to Nashville. Once again "Ruby" came into it on the audition tape and Tommy Sutton took it to Wesley Rose in Nashville and he got us an MGM contract. That was in April 1956. The first session for MGM was 'Ruby,’ 'My Aching Heart,’ [‘Who Done It’], and ‘Teardrops In My Eyes.’"

"Ruby," which Bobby learned from Cousin Emmy’s recording on a juke box at a rough "ginny barn" back home, had provided his calling card since earning him phone calls on his very first radio broadcast at age 16. The recording presaged many things for the Osborne Brothers, patterns that flow through many of the best of the 114 selections heard here. They adapt material to their own sound, speeding up her version with distinctive bluegrass banjo playing that preserves the tension of Cousin Emmy’s frailling. Bobby’s voice cuts high and laser clear. They innovate with the twin banjos and ornate, sustained vocal ending, while incorporating the then current fad of twin fiddles. "Ruby" appears twice more in this set: the 1963 version that appears as the title track of a Decca LP, and a previously unreleased, strangely truncated track from 1967 that somewhat suggests the utterly orgasmic jam explosion of a song at Camp Springs in 1970.

Although the relationship soured with MGM, who used the Osbornes as a write off against the profits from Conway Twitty and Connie Francis, Sonny later recognized how much those years helped them. "The good thing about is was that every three months we had a new single record released, right on the money. It didn’t matter what it sold. We got a lot of music recorded right then. We got a lot of ideas; the high lead trio was started back then. We pretty much had carte blanche to experiment in the studio, ‘cause nobody was buying bluegrass records, anyway....[T]he thing we didn’t realize was that they were really laying a good foundation for what we did in the mid-1960s."

Much of the 1956 and 1957 MGM output heard on the first disc proves thoroughly excellent bluegrass, but not radically distinctive save for "Ruby," the debut of Bobby’s mandolin style on "My Aching Heart," and some spectacular ending harmonies. The listener clearly hears the Osbornes cut the Gordian knot of bluegrass singing with the high lead arrangement initially recorded October 17, 1957 on "Once More." This permitted Bobby to become the primary lead singer (Allen would depart by the next spring) from on top with Sonny’s baritone below and the "lead" voice singing a low tenor beneath it. The Stanley Brothers had already recorded in that configuration, but the Osborne Brothers mined every potential advantage of the flexibility it provided. Using pedal steel changes for models, Sonny and Bobby, along with Allen, Benny Birchfield, Jimmy Brown, Jr., Dale Sledd, and, on a 1959 recording of "Give This message To Your Heart," Ira Louvin, moved parts and their relationships through ever more complex arrangements. That placed them at the forefront not just of bluegrass, but all country vocal stylings.

At the same time, Sonny, while writing one of the first bluegrass banjo instruction books, developed his supremely slippery, irrepressibly spontaneous banjo style. Disc four closes with ten instrumentals recorded for RCA in 1969 as "The Bluegrass Banjo Pickers." On then we can enjoy Sonny’s stunning ability to replicate totally Scruggs’ lead and backup playing. But by 1957 he realized that he had to do more than interpret new material as Earl would have. "So, I just completely turned off my old style and started out immediately on something new," he would tell Herschel Freeman for Frets. "After 1957, I didn’t listen to any other banjo players....I listened to every instrument you can imagine and tried to transpose that music to the banjo." Marking their first recordings made specifically for LP release, instrumental sessions from 1962 span discs one to two, including Sonny’s delightful "Old Hickory" and "Banjo Boy Chimes" featuring his harmony to Birchfield’s lead banjo.

That watershed year of ‘57 saw drums debut on Osborne Brothers recordings during the session that produced "Once More" and "She’s No Angel." Electric guitar, steel guitar, even tiple, would follow, but only drums and the electric bass, which appeared on 1966’s "The Kind of Woman I Got" became fixtures. Sometimes, as with "You’ll Never Know," perhaps the only convincing example of drums helping a bluegrass recording, the experiments paid off handsomely. Others, for example the electric guitar on "There’s A Woman Behind Every Man," hardly gave the songs a chance to amount to anything. On still other occasions, such as "I Love You Only," the vocals prove so delicious that, as with the Louvins and the Everlys, you just don’t care about the backing.

The thirty selections from 1962 and 1963 on the second platter complete the MGM era for the Osborne Brothers and. After the opening ten instrumentals, we find Sonny and Bobby with A&R men Wesley Rose and Jim Vienneau looking for hits, applying the Osborne approach to material new (Felice & Boudleaux Bryant’s "Poor Ole Cora"), old (the delightful "Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo" and "Worried Man Blues"), original (Bobby’s "The Banjo Boys"), and borrowed ("The Ballad of Jed Clampett," "White Lightnin’").

The Osbornes in truth probably raised more rankles with their pop and pop-bluegrass material than their instrumentation. The electricity and drums merely proved easier to pinpoint and articulate. Yet we find here example upon example of slick, commercial songs skillfully, at times brilliantly, adapted to the Osborne Brothers bluegrass for the masses approach. When you swing for the fences every time, you’re going to strike out a few times. Unfortunately, the Osborne’s surprisingly few whiffs, for instance Bill Sky’s teeny-bopper "Don’t Even Look At Me" and a previously unreleased cover of "Mule Train," tend to be so hook-filled that they penetrate your every thought process for the next 48 hours. During the first half of the 1960s Bobby and Sonny specialized in the odd niche of bluegrass anthems. I mean not instrumentals entitled "Bluegrass Breakdown," but catchy songs about bluegrass music ranging from the Styrofoam "Bluegrass Music’s Really Gone To Town" to Sonny’s classic "Me and My Ole Banjo" ("Bluegrass playing on the radio/I sure do love that sound;" "Listen there at ‘Earl’s Breakdown’/It makes my fingers weep").

By the first year of the LBJ administration the Osborne Brothers had rewritten the bluegrass rule book, waxed a number of songs that remain familiar in 1995, become the first major professional bluegrass band to play on a college campus, recorded the first bluegrass LP marketed for the folk boom audience, and become major innovators in country vocals. Yet they felt stagnated in their career at both MGM and on WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. From a Maryland motel room Sonny phoned Doyle Wilburn and accepted his offer to help. As quoted by Emerson, "Doyle said fine, and in 5 days he had us the Decca contract, a guest shot on the Grand Ole Opry and we signed with their publishing company, SureFire, and the Wil-Helm booking agency. 13 months later we be-came regular members of the Grand Ole Opry and this has been a lifelong dream.... Getting on the Grand Ole Opry was the real turning point in our careers."

Disc three proves it. The Wilburns provided even stronger material than Rose. Bobby kept singing better and better and evolving his mandolin virtuosity. Sonny played both breaks and back up like some half-man, half-god, a headful of ideas pumping into some of the most successful spontaneous digital formulaic composition ever captured in the recording studio. Sonny’s syncopation and distinctive bass note stylings have influenced banjo players for four decades.

Despite including "non-bluegrass" instruments on their recordings, the Osborne Brothers became even more committed to maintaining their vocal sound and their banjo and mandolin on each piece. Sonny possessed such confidence that he’d tackle any challenge to get his six-string Vega into action. "I was convinced [‘The Kind of Woman I Got’] was a hit song," he hold Freeman, "and I had to do something on it. So I tuned the banjo down four frets to E, which is very, very low and did a Don Rich guitar break."

This means that the first four years on Decca, documented on all of the third disc and half the fourth, contains a wealth of devastatingly strong performances. With picking, singing, and songs like this the listener simply forgets about the perhaps extraneous instruments. No drums, piano, nor steel can mar these sensational recordings by superlative bluegrass artists at the absolute height of their powers. Like Alison Krauss today, the Osborne Brothers managed to create a sound that brought in masses of country music fans without losing most of their bluegrass audience. To this day in the south and midwest you can find Osborne Brothers fans who don’t know Bill Monroe from Dave Apollon.

Disc three kicks and hard. Check out these great titles: "The Cuckoo Bird," "Kentucky," "Bugle on the Banjo" with awesome mandolin work from Bobby, "I’ll Be Alright Tomorrow," "Big Spike Hammer," "One Tear," "Lonesome Day," "Yesterday’s Gone," "Gotta Travel On," "Take This Hammer," and plenty more where they came from. The fourth disc hardly drags with "Lonesome Feeling," "Roll Muddy River," "The Kind of Woman I Got," and, of course, "Rocky Top." Sonny and Bobby worked for this stuff, too. Both "Roll Muddy River" and "Rocky Top," which they drove splendidly, came to them as slow, shuffle beat songs, while "Up This Hill and Down" had been a blues.

That suggests what a remarkable body of work appears on The Osborne Brothers: 1956-1968. It makes those prone to dis Sonny and Bobby appear to be the worst sort of success-envying, self-appointed "purists." Yes, you can hear lots of drums and a few awful ideas among these 114 cuts, but the great vastly outnumbers the weak. Over these thirteen years the Osborne Brothers established the foundation of bluegrass music today. They deserve every speck of credit they can get, especially from the stars of the 1990s. Anyone who can afford it, most especially those who may think too lightly of the Osbornes, deserves to treat themselves to this wonderful four-CD set.

(Bear Family Records; P.O. Box 1154; D-27727 Hambergen; Germany) AM