Bobby Osborne

He was born Robert Van Osborne Jr. on 7 December 1931 in Thousandsticks, near Hyden in Leslie County, Kentucky, the son of two schoolteachers. In the early 1940s the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where his father taught him his first guitar chords. In 1947 Bobby, his sister Louise and Sonny went to see Bill Monroe’s band play in Dayton, and two years later Bobby made his first broadcast, on WPFB in Middletown, Ohio.

From 1949 to 1951 he played guitar with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers in Bluefield, West Virginia, alongside the banjo player Larry Richardson. Their first session, for the Cozy label, included “Pain in My Heart,” which Flatt & Scruggs soon picked up and recorded. When Jimmy Martin joined the Fiddlers in June 1951, Bobby moved over to mandolin, and on 27 August that year he and Martin recorded for King in Cincinnati, with Bobby singing tenor. He then spent three weeks with the Stanley Brothers before joining the Marines. He served in Korea, where he was wounded in combat and received the Purple Heart, and was discharged in late 1953.

Back home he teamed up with Sonny, and the two worked with Martin as Jimmy Martin and the Osborne Brothers, first on WPFB and then on WJR in Detroit. Their RCA Victor session of 16 November 1954 produced “Save It! Save It!” and “Chalk Up Another One.” By early 1956 the brothers were back in Dayton, where they formed an act with the singer and guitarist Red Allen and signed with MGM. Their first MGM session, on 1 July 1956 in Nashville, produced Cousin Emmy’s “Ruby, Are You Mad,” and that year they joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling.

On “Once More,” recorded on 17 October 1957, the brothers broke with the usual bluegrass trio, in which the melody sat in the middle with a tenor above and a baritone below. Instead they put Bobby’s lead on top of the two harmony voices. The record reached No. 13 on the country chart, and after Allen left in 1958 the high-lead trio became the band’s trademark. Bobby’s mandolin playing grew out of fiddle tunes; his breaks, built from long runs of single-note arpeggios around the melody, set the pattern most later bluegrass mandolinists followed.

In March 1960 the Osbornes played Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the first bluegrass band to play a college campus. They signed with Decca in 1963 and joined the Opry cast in 1964. “Rocky Top,” by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, was recorded on 16 November 1967 at Bradley’s Barn in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, and released on Christmas Day. It reached No. 33 on the country chart and in 1982 became an official Tennessee state song, and in 1992 Kentucky gave a similar honor to their arrangement of “Kentucky.” Bobby also wrote songs: “Windy City,” written with Pete Goble, was recorded by the Osbornes in 1970, and Alison Krauss later made it the title track of an album.

On country package tours the brothers used pickups, electric bass and eventually drums, though they dropped the pickups in 1974. The Country Music Association named them Vocal Group of the Year in 1971, and in 1973 they became the first bluegrass act to play the White House. The Osborne Brothers entered the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2002, and the brothers received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1997; Bobby was honored again in 2009, when the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers were inducted.

When surgery on Sonny’s rotator cuff ended their partnership, Bobby formed the Rocky Top X-Press, with his son Bobby Jr. on guitar. His 2017 album Original, produced by Alison Brown, brought him his first solo Grammy nomination, for Best Bluegrass Album. He died on 27 June 2023 at a hospital in Gallatin, Tennessee, aged 91.