Muleskinner Blues · Molly and Tenbrooks

Sonny Osborne’s records under his own name come from the years between his time as a teenage banjo player with Bill Monroe and the start of the Osborne Brothers’ MGM contract. Born in October 1937, he joined Monroe in the summer of 1952, while his brother Bobby was in the Marines. On 18 July 1952 he played banjo on a Monroe session at Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel, with Jimmy Martin on guitar, Charlie Cline on fiddle and Ernie Newton on bass. “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake” is one of the sides from that date.

From the autumn of 1952 he recorded for himself at the Gateway studio on Spring Grove Avenue in Cincinnati. On the first sessions his band was Carlos Brock on guitar, Enos Johnson on mandolin, Billy Thomas on fiddle and Smokey Ward on bass, and the singing was shared among Brock, Johnson and Sonny. The records came out on the Kentucky label and on Gateway itself. “Letter from My Darling,” “The Old Home Town” and “Get in Line Brother” appeared in 1952. In May 1953 Gateway issued “Sunny Mountain Chimes,” a banjo piece of Sonny’s own, backed with his vocal on “A Brother in Korea.” “Cabin Home on the Hill” and “Pain in My Heart,” cut in November 1952, followed as Kentucky 608.

Bobby came home from the Korean War in 1953. At an August 1953 Gateway session the brothers recorded together, with Bobby on mandolin, Enos Johnson moving to guitar, and Bobby, Sonny and Johnson singing trios. That session produced “I’ll Meet You in Church Sunday Morning” and “River of Death” (Kentucky 596), “Molly and Tenbrooks” and “Mule Skinner Blues” (Kentucky 605), and “Baby Blue Eyes.” Gateway’s last Sonny Osborne singles were the instrumental “Gun Powder” in February 1954 and a run of banjo EPs. Two of the EPs, issued in 1956 and credited to Sonny Osborne and His Sunny Mountain Boys, were recorded that February, with Bobby on mandolin, Red Allen on guitar, Art Stamper on fiddle and Les Bodine on bass. Within months the brothers and Allen were recording for MGM.

The Cincinnati masters had a long afterlife on budget LPs. In 1964 some were reissued under the name Stanley Alpine. In 1979 Gateway gathered them on three volumes titled Early Recordings of Sonny Osborne, which Crosscut reissued on CD between 1999 and 2001.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.