The Osborne Brothers and Red Allen

The partnership began in Dayton, Ohio, where Allen had been leading a band in the city’s taverns and where the Osbornes’ family had settled. When the banjo player Noah Crase left Allen in 1954 to join Bill Monroe, one of his replacements was the seventeen-year-old Sonny Osborne, and less than two years later Allen, Sonny and Bobby were playing together, with the fiddler Art Stamper, at a Dayton club called the Friendly Inn. Early in 1956 they formed a trio and signed with MGM as the Osborne Brothers & Red Allen.

Their first session, at RCA Victor’s studio on McGavock Street in Nashville on 1 July 1956, with Wesley Rose and Jim Vienneau producing, Ernie Newton on bass and Tommy Jackson on fiddle, produced “Ruby, Are You Mad,” a romp with two banjos, “My Aching Heart,” “Who Done It” and “Teardrops in My Eyes,” which Allen wrote with Tommy Sutton. “Ruby” and “My Aching Heart” came out that August, and in October the group joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia. A second session on 29 December 1956, with Gordon Terry on fiddle, brought “Wild Mountain Honey,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” “Ho, Honey, Ho” and “Della Mae.” On the early sides Allen sang most of the leads and played a booming rhythm guitar under Bobby’s mandolin and Sonny’s banjo.

At the third session, on 17 October 1957, the producers added Shot Jackson on Dobro and Buddy Harman on drums, and the group cut “She’s No Angel,” “(Is This) My Destiny,” “Two Lonely Hearts” and “Once More.” On “Once More” Bobby took a high lead with Sonny’s baritone beneath it and Allen’s tenor lowest of all, the reverse of the usual bluegrass stack. Issued in November 1957, it reached No. 13 on the country chart in 1958, and the Country Gentlemen later modeled their trio singing on the sound. The last session, at Bradley Film and Recording Studio on 13 February 1958, added Jimmy Crawford’s steel guitar to “Lost Highway,” “Love Pains,” “It Hurts to Know” and “If You Don’t, Somebody Else Will.”

The four sessions produced sixteen sides. Allen left in the middle of 1958, but MGM kept issuing the trio’s singles until “Lost Highway” in June 1959, and several of the sides were gathered on the Osbornes’ first MGM album, Country Pickin’ and Hillside Singin’. The brothers carried the high-lead trio on with later partners, and Allen went on to lead the Kentuckians with Frank Wakefield around Washington, D.C. The complete MGM recordings were later reissued, among other places, on Bear Family’s The Osborne Brothers 1956–1968.