Jethro Burns
Kenneth “Jethro” Burns was a mandolinist and comic singer who spent nearly four decades as half of Homer & Jethro with the guitarist Henry “Homer” Haynes, a duo known for song parodies and for their playing. After Haynes died in 1971 he worked mainly as a jazz mandolinist, and Homer & Jethro were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.
Burns was born in 1920 and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he began playing mandolin at six. In 1932 the radio man Lowell Blanchard pulled him and Haynes, both twelve, from two separate bands auditioning for the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round on WNOX in Knoxville. As the String Dusters they played country songs, hoedowns and current pop numbers, and for comic relief the two boys sang hillbilly versions of pop standards. When Blanchard forgot their nicknames during a 1936 broadcast he introduced them as Homer & Jethro, and the names stuck.
After the String Dusters broke up in 1938, Haynes and Burns carried on as a duo and joined the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. Following service in World War II they resumed with a Saturday-morning show on WLW in Cincinnati, and early in 1946 King Records owner Syd Nathan hired them for the label’s house band. On 2 October 1946, at the E. T. Herzog studio in Cincinnati, Burns played guitar and mandolin and Haynes guitar behind the Delmore Brothers, with Roy Lanham on electric guitar and Wayne Raney on harmonica, on a King session that produced “Goin’ Back to the Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Take It to the Captain.” Under their own name they had a regional success on King with a hillbilly version of “Five Minutes More.”
Steve Sholes signed them to RCA Victor in the spring of 1949 and encouraged them to write parodies; their first two, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” with June Carter, and “Tennessee Border No. 2,” sold well. In 1950 they joined WLS in Chicago and appeared often on the National Barn Dance and Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club, and Chicago remained their base. “(How Much Is) That Hound Dog in the Window” reached No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart in 1953, and “The Battle of Kookamonga,” a send-up of “The Battle of New Orleans,” made both the country and pop charts and won the 1959 Grammy for Best Comedy Performance, Musical. They played Las Vegas from 1951 and appeared on the network television shows of Steve Allen and Johnny Carson. After the live album Homer & Jethro at the Country Club (1960) they concentrated on albums, and they were spokesmen in two Kellogg’s Corn Flakes campaigns.
The musicianship behind the comedy was real. On their first Carson appearance, asked to play something serious, they played “Autumn Leaves” with Burns taking the lead on mandolin. For years they also recorded with Chet Atkins, Burns’s brother-in-law, in the instrumental group the Nashville String Band. Burns favored clean, single-note jazz lines and sophisticated chords, and brought standards by Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Cole Porter to many country mandolinists.
When Haynes died suddenly in August 1971, young bluegrass mandolinists sought Burns out for ideas and technique, and he began playing folk clubs and festivals as a jazz instrumentalist. He briefly revived the comedy act with the multi-instrumentalist Ken Eidson, played Chicago nightspots, recorded for Flying Fish with the jazz violinist Joe Venuti, appeared with Pete Fountain, and toured for five years with the Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. In 1975 he joined Norman Blake, Tut Taylor, Sam Bush, Butch Robins, Vassar Clements and David Holland on an album named for all seven. His own albums included Jethro Burns (1977), Back to Back with the western swing mandolinist Tiny Moore (1979), Live on Flying Fish (1980), Tea for One (Kaleidoscope, 1982) and Old Friends with Red Rector (1983).
Burns kept performing until his death at his home in Evanston, Illinois, on 4 February 1989, at the age of 68. Recordings from his last sessions in 1987 and 1988 were released by Acoustic Disc as Swing Low, Sweet Mandolin (1995) and Bye Bye Blues (1997).
