Hylo Brown and the Timberliners

Frank “Hylo” Brown, whose nickname began as a disc jockey’s joke on the range of his voice, had recorded for Capitol since 1954 and from early 1955 led a band called the Buckskin Boys on the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who had been listening to his records, hired him, and in 1957 he joined their shows for Martha White Mills, singing a few numbers between sets with the Foggy Mountain Boys. When Martha White wanted to send out a second unit, Brown organized the Timberliners, renaming his Buckskin Boys, and the sponsor added five television shows for the new band, which still worked under the Flatt & Scruggs banner.

The shows went out live at six in the evening, so each band had to travel its own circuit every week: the Timberliners covered Mississippi and Tennessee while Flatt & Scruggs worked West Virginia and Virginia, though the two units swapped routes a couple of times. After each broadcast the Timberliners played a show date as far out as fifty or sixty miles from the station, and at the end of the week they drove to Nashville for the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night.

The full lineup went into Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville for four Capitol sessions with Ken Nelson producing, on 9, 10, 16 and 17 August 1958. Rector sang as well as played mandolin, Tate sang baritone, and the Jordanaires joined them on the last two days. The first two sessions, older songs such as “Flower Blooming in the Wildwood,” “Put My Little Shoes Away,” “Love and Wealth,” “Darling Nellie Across the Sea” and “When It’s Lamp Lightin’ Time in the Valley,” became the album Hylo Brown, issued in April 1959; the August 17 session produced the singles “Thunder Clouds of Love” and “It’s All Over Now (But the Crying).”

On the band’s 1959 recordings Brown, Smoak and Tate were joined by other bass players. Radio shows broadcast from WSIP in Paintsville, Kentucky, in January 1959 and a concert at New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, on 9 August 1959 were issued on record decades later. That summer the band went with Earl Scruggs to the first Newport Folk Festival; the invitation was to Scruggs alone, and Flatt, unhappy with the billing, stayed away, so Scruggs played with Brown’s group, and performances by Brown there of “John Henry,” “Gathering Flowers” and “Love and Wealth” later appeared on Vanguard. A reviewer for a New York folk magazine dismissed Brown’s country presentation. Flatt & Scruggs played Newport together the following year.

Brown’s last Capitol session, on 31 October 1960, used a different band, with Billy Edwards on banjo, Norman Blake on Dobro, Bill Lowe on bass and Louie Proffit on fiddle, and its songs stayed unissued until Bear Family collected his Capitol recordings in 1992 on the double CD Hylo Brown & the Timberliners 1954–1960. When his Capitol contract ran out in 1961 Brown signed with Starday, which billed him as “the Bluegrass Balladeer,” and he later left the Flatt & Scruggs organization for a career under his own name. Starday’s Bluegrass Goes to College (November 1962), recorded at Starday Sound Studio in Nashville on 22 and 23 April 1962 with Tommy Hill producing, was made up of traditional songs such as “Sourwood Mountain,” “Take This Hammer,” “Barbara Allen” and “The Knoxville Girl.”