Hylo Brown

He was born Frank Brown Jr. on 20 April 1922 at River, in Johnson County, Kentucky. His radio career began in 1939 on WCMI in Ashland, Kentucky, and he moved on to the Saturday jamboree of WLOG in Logan, West Virginia, before his family settled in Springfield, Ohio, where he began writing songs and singing on local stations. At WPFB in Middletown, Ohio, Smoky Ward, who could not remember his name, started calling him “Hi-Lo,” a joke on the range of his voice, and the name stuck. In 1950 he recorded with Bradley Kincaid at the WWSO studio in Springfield.

In 1954 a song of his, “Lost to a Stranger,” was sent to Ken Nelson at Capitol as material for Kitty Wells, and Nelson offered Brown a contract to record it himself. His first session, on 7 November 1954 at Castle Studio in Nashville with Nelson producing, had Joe Drumwright on banjo, Gordon Terry on mandolin, Howard Watts on bass and Red Taylor on fiddle, and “Lost to a Stranger” with “Get Lost, You Wolf” became his first single in May 1955. Early that year he formed a band, the Buckskin Boys, and joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia. At his Capitol session of 27 June 1956 Grady Martin played electric guitar and mandolin and Dale Potter fiddle, and it produced “The Only One,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” “Nobody’s Darling but Mine” and “One Way Train.”

In 1957 Brown joined Flatt & Scruggs on their Martha White Mills shows, singing on his own and with the Foggy Mountain Boys. Flatt and Scruggs sang with him at his Capitol session of 29 May 1957, with Martin on guitar and Tommy Jackson on fiddle, which produced “Foolish Pride,” “John Henry” and “There’s More Pretty Girls Than One.” He in turn played bass on Flatt & Scruggs’s Columbia session of 11 July 1957, which included “I’ll Take the Blame” and “Let Those Brown Eyes Smile at Me,” and guitar on their session of 5 April 1959, which produced “Cabin on the Hill” and “Someone You Have Forgotten.”

When Martha White Flour, Flatt & Scruggs’s sponsor, wanted a second unit, Brown organized one, still working under the Flatt & Scruggs organization. Martha White added five television shows for it, all done live at six in the evening: Brown’s band worked Tennessee and Mississippi while Flatt & Scruggs toured West Virginia and Virginia, playing dates within fifty or sixty miles of each station after the show. He renamed his band the Timberliners: Brown on guitar, Red Rector on mandolin, Jim Smoak on banjo, Clarence “Tater” Tate on fiddle and Joe “Flap Jack” Phillips on bass. That lineup recorded four Capitol sessions in Nashville in August 1958, two of them with the Jordanaires, and the songs became his album Hylo Brown (Capitol, April 1959), a set of older songs such as “Flower Blooming in the Wildwood,” “Put My Little Shoes Away” and “When It’s Lamp Lightin’ Time in the Valley.” Radio shows from WSIP in Paintsville, Kentucky, in January 1959 and a concert at New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, on 9 August 1959 were later issued on record, and he sang at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. His last Capitol session, on 31 October 1960, had Billy Edwards on banjo, Norman Blake on Dobro, Louie Proffit on fiddle and Bill Lowe on bass; its four songs stayed unissued until 1992, when Bear Family collected his Capitol years on the double CD Hylo Brown & the Timberliners 1954–1960.

Brown signed with Starday in 1961. His first session there, on 21 November 1961 with Tommy Hill producing, used Josh Graves and Shot Jackson on Dobro, Curtis McPeak and Joe Drumright on banjo, Junior Huskey on bass and Chubby Wise on fiddle. Starday issued Bluegrass Balladeer in July 1962 and Bluegrass Goes to College that November, then Hylo Brown Meets the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers (March 1963), recorded in November 1962 with Melvin and Ray Goins, James W. Roberts, Ezra Cline and Curly Ray Cline, and Sing Me a Bluegrass Song (December 1963), which included “Truck Drivin’ Man.”

From 1967 he recorded mainly in Akron, Ohio, with Lee Sutton producing, for Rural Rhythm, which issued seven of his albums between March 1967 and July 1968, among them Hylo Brown Sings Folk Songs of Rural America, Legends and Tall Tales and Sings Country Gospel Songs; Tater Tate rejoined him for a 1968 session. In the 1970s he recorded for small labels, among them Jessup (Hylo Brown Sings His Bluegrass Hits, 1973), Vetco (Gospel Sounds of Hylo Brown, 1976, and Hylo Brown Bluegrass Favorites, 1978) and Atteiram (A Tribute to My Heroes, 1977), and Josh Graves and Buddy Spicher played on a 1977 session. He retired in 1991 and moved to Mechanicsburg, Ohio. Hylo Brown died on 17 January 2003. Weeks later the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America named him to its Preservation Hall of Greats, and in 2009 he received the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award.