Dale Sledd
Dale Sledd was a guitarist and singer who played rhythm guitar and sang in the trio with Bobby and Sonny Osborne in the Osborne Brothers from the mid-1960s to 1977, the years of “Rocky Top,” “Roll Muddy River” and “Tennessee Hound Dog.” He shares the writer’s credit with Sonny Osborne for the banjo instrumental “Sledd Ridin’.”
Sledd first recorded with the Osbornes for Decca on 7 October 1965, at the Columbia studio on 16th Avenue South in Nashville, with Harry Silverstein producing, taking the guitar and vocal place Gordon Cash had held at the band’s January session. From 1966 he was a regular member, and over the next eleven years he played on the band’s sessions at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, alongside Nashville players such as Ray Edenton, Grady Martin, Leon Rhodes and the steel guitarist Hal Rugg. He was one of the three guitarists on “Rocky Top,” cut on 16 November 1967, and the records of his years with the band include “Roll Muddy River,” “Tennessee Hound Dog,” “Ruby, Are You Mad?,” “Georgia Piney Woods,” “Midnight Flyer” and “Fastest Grass Alive.”
“Sledd Ridin’,” credited to him and Sonny Osborne, was recorded at Bradley’s Barn on 8 August 1973, with Vassar Clements on fiddle, and came out at the end of that year as the B-side of “Fastest Grass Alive” and on the MCA album Fastest Grass Alive; J. D. Crowe and Jim Mills later recorded it as well. He also sang and played guitar on the band’s 1977 CMH double album From Rocky Top to Muddy Bottom, which revisited “Rocky Top,” “Georgia Piney Woods” and “Tennessee Hound Dog.”
After leaving the Osbornes in 1977 he worked with Grandpa and Ramona Jones and later with the Silverado Band; earlier he had also sung in a duo with his wife, Patsy. He died on 21 August 2016, and his funeral was held at the Reser Funeral Home in Warsaw, Missouri.
