Bud Brewster
Bud Brewster is a banjo player, guitarist and singer from Knoxville, Tennessee, who with his brother Willie G. Brewster played in the Brewster Brothers and, from 1957 into the late 1960s, in Carl Story’s Rambling Mountaineers, playing banjo on Story’s Mercury instrumental “Mocking Banjo” and on a run of Starday gospel albums. From the mid-1970s he was guitarist and lead singer of the Knoxville band the Pinnacle Boys.
His full name is Franklin D. Brewster. The Brewster Brothers played Knoxville’s Cas Walker Show and the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, and recorded under their own name for Acme in 1958 and for Janet in 1961. On 25 February 1957, at the RCA Victor studio in Nashville, Bud played banjo and Willie mandolin on a Carl Story session for Mercury with Claude Boone on bass and Tater Tate on fiddle. It produced “Light at the River” and “Mocking Banjo,” issued together as Mercury 71088 on 21 March 1957, as well as the banjo piece “Banjo on the Mountain” and “Got a Lot to Tell Jesus”; it was Story’s first session with a bluegrass banjo. Bud and Willie Brewster are credited as the writers of “Mocking Banjo,” which is a version of the Arthur Smith and Don Reno instrumental “Feudin’ Banjos.”
When Story moved to Starday, the brothers went with him. Bud played banjo and Willie mandolin, with Boone on bass, on Everybody Will Be Happy and Get Religion (both 1961), recorded at radio station WCRS in Greenwood, South Carolina, in November and December 1960; on Mighty Close to Heaven (1963), cut at Starday’s Nashville studio in November 1962, the brothers swapped, Willie on banjo and Bud on mandolin, with Tommy Jackson on fiddle. Bud was back on banjo for Sacred Songs of Life and the Hereafter (recorded May 1964) and There’s Nothing on Earth That Heaven Can’t Cure (recorded March 1965), and the later albums came out as Carl Story and the Brewster Brothers: Sing the Gospel Songs You Ask For (Rimrock, 1967) and My Lord Keeps a Record (Starday, 1968).
In the Pinnacle Boys he switched to guitar and sang lead. On the band’s Rounder album, recorded at Glaser Brothers’ studio in Nashville on 28 December 1974 and released in 1975, he played with Larry Mathis on banjo, Jim Smith on mandolin, Randall Collins and Jerry Moore on fiddles and Ray Rose on bass, and he and Mathis wrote songs together. The band also recorded for Polydor (1974) and Atteiram (1975), and on High Lonesome Bluegrass (CMH, 1980), produced by Sonny Osborne, Brewster again sang lead and played guitar, with Mike Pearson on banjo, Jim Smith on mandolin and Collins and Moore on fiddles. His nephew, Willie’s son Paul Brewster, became a tenor singer with the Osborne Brothers and Ricky Skaggs.
-
Carl Story and His Rambling MountaineersPlayed on recordings with Carl Story and His Rambling Mountaineers
