PopSyndicate.com

I remember a time when I was young, riding in my grandparents’ giant blue Lincoln Continental in East Texas, that they would frequently pop in cassette tapes of stuff they called bluegrass. I called it dreck, or at least something a 5-year old’s vocabulary would contain. I hated it. All I wanted to listen to was stuff like Richie Valens, The Beach Boys or Elvis, but if we just had to listen to country, I wanted to hear The Oak Ridge Boys or Alabama. Yeah, I was not exactly a typical kid of the Eighties. As the years passed, however, my Southern roots quickly grew deep and I developed a love for the older sounds of country, like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. In my twenties I started down the path of bluegrass with a song called “Rocky Top Tennessee” that I heard while watching a Time Life informercial.

If you’ve heard the classic hits “Rocky Top Tennessee,” or “Ruby Are You Mad?”, then you’ve heard the Osborne Brothers. And, if you’ve heard the Osborne Brothers, then you’ll recognize the high tenor of Bobby Osborne; it’s a tenor that I was worried about before listening. Osborne is in his seventh decade and few out there can maintain their voice, let alone something as pure as Bobby’s is known to be. My fears seemed to be justified when the opening verse hit for “What Kind of Fool” because his voice in that opening moment isn’t particularly strong and I thought that what I was faced with what would be a severely aged voice with bright picking behind. Thankfully, I was wrong. When the chorus hits, Osborne’s voice is still high, pure and very much Bobby Osborne. He’s lost a step, but it’s only a small one.

The Osbornes were known for being bluegrass rebels when they emerged on the Nashville scene because they added in percussion, but Bluegrass Melodies is a return to tradition in both instrumentation and theme, meaning stand-up bass, guitar, banjo, and mandolin accompanying songs about love, loss and family. On the album, the group covers every classic bluegrass rhythm from waltz to shuffle and they do it crisply in a bright and cheery manner, but then every song starts to sound the same. Most tunes start with banjo or guitar-picking openers and swerving into full X-press, with Bobby on lead and the Rocky Top X-press (Osborne’s band) harmonizing during the chorus. There’s very little change in pace from song to song, making it so the sad songs don’t sound so sad and the happy songs approach meloncholy in spots.

The album isn’t Osborne’s best work and it won’t sit in the annals of bluegrass history, but it’s not David Lee Roth’s mystique-ruining Strummin’ With the Devil either. Bluegrass Melodies is a belt-notcher for Osborne and a sweet glass of ice cold tea for the rest of us.

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