Kirk Brandenberger
Kirk Brandenberger is a fiddler from Keokuk, Iowa, who played on Larry Sparks’s John Deere Tractor and with Karl Shiflett & the Big Country Show, and made two instrumental albums of his own. With his wife, Becky, he ran Prime Cuts of Bluegrass, the radio promotion service, from 1992 to 2009, work for which the IBMA gave the couple its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2004.
His first album, Fiddlin’ Around, came out in 1977 on the Professional Artist label, recorded at that company’s studio in St. Louis with Bill Jones on guitar, David Gaines on banjo, John Purk on mandolin and Mona Jones on bass. It is a set of fourteen instrumentals, among them “Tom and Jerry,” “Rachel,” “Shannon Waltz” and his own “Ernie and Kirk’s Breakdown.”
In March 1978 he was the fiddler on Larry Sparks’s first album for Rebel, John Deere Tractor, cut at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, with Tommy Boyd on banjo and Dobro; Rebel released it in 1980. A second solo album, Fiddler on the Hoof (1988), had Bob Black on banjo, Al Murphy on guitar, Brent Truitt on mandolin and Mark Schatz on bass, and mixed Kenny Baker’s “Greenleaf Breakdown” and “Denver Belle” and Lyman Enloe’s “Rugged Road” with fiddle tunes such as “Martha Campbell” and “Durang’s Hornpipe.” The same year Jim Simpson & the Kentucky Mountain Grass released an album titled Reminiscing with Kirk Brandenberger.
On 15 July 1992 Kirk and Becky Brandenberger, trading as KBC Music, sent out the first Prime Cuts of Bluegrass CD to bluegrass radio hosts, programmers and the press. The service began in Owensboro, Kentucky, and moved in 1994 to Keokuk. Six times a year a new volume of twelve to fifteen tracks chosen by labels and artists went to hundreds of program directors and show hosts, and it figured in the promotion of most new releases by major bluegrass acts. The hundredth volume, shipped in July 2009, was the couple’s last; in September they announced that the service would carry on under a new owner.
Alongside that work he kept playing. He was the fiddler with Karl Shiflett & the Big Country Show on its first Rebel album, Karl Shiflett & the Big Country Show (1999), recorded at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville, on its live video from the Yanceyville Opry in North Carolina (2000), and, with Chuck Westerman and Jimmy Campbell, on In Full Color (2001). America’s Old-Time Country Music Hall of Fame, in Anita, Iowa, inducted him in 2006, and in June 2014 he was among the first class of the Iowa Music Hall of Fame, as a fiddler and the former operator of Prime Cuts.
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Larry Sparks and the Lonesome RamblersPlayed on recordings with Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers
