“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.
