1980 Bobby Osborne Brothers Mandolin Bluegrass - 2-Page Vintage Article

Description

1980 Bobby Osborne Brothers Mandolin Bluegrass - 2-Page Vintage Article
Original, Vintage Magazine article
Page Size: Approx. 8" x 11" (21 cm x 28 cm) each page
Condition: Good
Bobby
Osborne’s
Instrumental
Expertise
Starting
To Surface
by Larry Rhodes
The mandolin isn’t too commercial.
That’s one reason Bobby Osborne,
mandolin player and high lead singer with
the Osborne Brothers, has kept low-keyed
about his instrumental ability. Modesty is
another. Osborne talks more confidently
about his singing than his playing, feeling
the mandolin has substantial limitations.
Throughout a career that has gained
the team an unusually large number of
awards in country music for a bluegrass
group, Osborne’s brother Sonny has
dominated the instrumental spotlight.
The first major effort to spotlight
Osborne’s mandolin is on “Bluegrass
Concerto,” the group’s newest instru-
mental album for CMH Records.
The album lacks the commercial
country-bluegrass sound that netted the
group such hit records as “Rocky Top” and
“Tennessee Hound Dog.” In the early ’60s,
when bluegrass was taking a backseat to
country music, the guys successfully
fought the competition with piano, pedal
steel, drums and electric lead guitar.
But the Osbornes grew tired of that
sound and, after 13 successful years with
the label, left MCA to record a different
sound with CMH records. It's difficult to
say whether their music became more
orthodox. They did unplug their instru-
ments, but Buddy Spicher scored and
played all the parts for a complete string
section on “Bluegrass Concerto.”
This time Bobby and Sonny shared
the spotlight equally. One side features
Sonny, and the other side features Bobby.
Bobby frankly admits he hadn’t been
featuring his mandolin because he doesn’t
think there’s much of a market for
mandolin instrumentals.
“I always concentrated more on
singing because nobody wanted to hear
me pick anyway,” says Osborne. “You’re
limited on the mandolin. It’s not like any
other instrument.
“The reason the mandolin fits
bluegrass is because the scale on it is so
high. Your E string is eight notes higher
than the first string on the guitar. It just
goes well with the high-pitched keys used
in bluegrass.”
Osborne talks as if he took up the
mandolin because he was a frustrated
fiddler.
“A fiddle is something I always liked
to play, and I was never no good with a
bow,” says Osborne. “The mandolin, since
it is tuned exactly like the violin, was the
closest thing I could come to (playing) the
fiddle.”
True to tradition, Osborne is another
of the self-taught bluegrass instru-
mentalists. Although he had a musical
background as a guitarist, Osborne took
up the mandolin with no previous formal
musical training. He still can’t read music,
and he frankly admits he has no regrets
about failing to learn.
“I don’t believe reading music would
have helped me any,” says Osborne. “On
the other hand, it possibly could have
helped me, but I think the person that
reads music and plays notes as they’re
written on paper, I don’t think they ever
get the feeling they do when it just comes
natural to you.”
But Osborne still admits that Buddy
Spicher’s ability to not only read but also
write musical arrangements was an
instrumental factor in the uniqueness of
“Bluegrass Concerto.”
“The greatness of the album would
have to be credited to Buddy I think,”
says Osborne. “He came out to my house
and put all those instrumentals of mine on
tape and took ’em home and wrote the
arrangements. He had a whole bunch of
fiddles over there with him that day and a
cello and a viola, anything that would fill it
up. The greatness of the album would, as I
said, definitely be because of Buddy."
Osborne wrote many of the instru-
mentals on the album. He says he’s been
writing instrumentals for years, many of
which he’s never recorded. He describes
his instrumental writing formula as being
very similar to that which he uses when
writing songs.
“You get to fooling around in some
minor or major key, and you just run onto
maybe a different pattern of notes or
something, and just keep adding to it.”
Of the tunes Osborne wrote for the
album, which include two waltzes, his
favorite is “Shawnee,” which, as the name
implies, has overtones of an Indian
melody.
“All the tunes on my side stick to the
major chords except that one, and it’s
written in D minor,” says Bobby. “Buddy
played the fiddle on that, and he played, I
think, like Stephane Grapelli would play
except in a minor key. The type fiddle
break he played on it was, I think, what
got me to thinking in terms of an Indian
name for it.”
Osborne says he has no idea when he
and Sonny will do an instrumental album
again.
“That’s the type of instrumental
album that we wanted to do years ago,”
notes Osborne. “But we never could get
anybody to let us do it. These guys at the
record companies want an idea that’s built
on something that’s already made it.
“Way back when Danny Davis first
came out with the banjo playing
“Cumberland Gap” and put all that brass
with it, when we were with MGM, Sonny
tried to get them to let him do something
like that then. They thought he was
crazy.”
Despite the attention that Sonny’s
banjo playing has received, Bobby was in
the music business three years before his
brother. His first job was working with a
group on radio station WPFB in
Middletown, Ohio, in 1948. Although, like
most bluegrass mandolin players, Os-
borne started out to emulate Bill Monroe,
his favorite mandolin style now is Jesse
McReynolds’.
“Jesse patterns his stuff after the
banjo, with the roll on the mandolin, and I
pattern most of mine after the fiddle,”
says Osborne. “Once I learned a lot of
fiddle tunes, they helped me with my
instrumental breaks on songs.”
Actually, Osborne had hardly heard
anyone but Monroe play mandolin before
he took up the instrument. The
instrumentalists who were influencing
him were Earl Scruggs and fiddler
Chubby Wise, but being an electric lead
guitarist initially, his playing had traces of
Hank Garland’s style.
But as in the early days, Osborne’s
favorite instrument is still the fiddle.
Despite the fact that his multiple duties as
emcee, mandolin player and lead singer
for the Osborne Brothers have dis-
couraged him from playing his fiddle on
stage, which he did for a few years, his
goal is still to fulfill his life’s dream to be a
great fiddler.
“On that instrumental album, I
played ’Black Mountain Blues’ on the
fiddle, and on a couple of the waltzes, I
played harmony parts with Buddy
Spicher,” says Osborne. “I’m still working
on it. I’ve got nine of ’em here at the
house, and I saw on ’em all the time.”
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