Cabin Home on the Hill · Pain in My Heart

Before he was half of the Osborne Brothers, Sonny Osborne was a banjo prodigy — and a few of his earliest records were issued under his own name alone.

Osborne was astonishingly young when he started cutting records. Still a teenager in the early 1950s, and already a formidable Scruggs-style player, he made sides for the small Gateway label in Cincinnati, and in 1952 — at fourteen — he was hired to play banjo on Bill Monroe's Decca sessions, a near-unheard-of vote of confidence in a boy that age. A handful of singles from those early years carry his name as leader rather than the brother-act billing that would soon become permanent.

What they document is the launch of one of the most important banjo careers in the music. Osborne would go on to refine a powerful, melodic, hard-driving style — and, just as important, to become the arranging brain behind the Osborne Brothers, the band member who pushed the act to stack its harmony in that famous high trio and to experiment with steel guitar, drums, and country production.

These early solo singles are best understood as a prologue. They catch a gifted kid working out, in public and on record, the ideas that would carry him and his brother Bobby to the Grand Ole Opry and the top of the country charts. For anyone tracing the Osborne sound to its source, this is where it begins.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.