“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.
