Robby Osborne

He was in the Osborne Brothers’ band by 1971, when Sonny Osborne remembered the lineup at Camp Springs, North Carolina, as Bobby and Sonny with Ronnie Reno, Dennis Digby, Dale Sledd and Robby Osborne. In those years the band carried drums, alongside Digby’s and later Jimmy Brock’s electric bass, and Sonny later said that with Robby on drums neither brother had much rhythm to play. Robby was the drummer on the band’s MCA sessions at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, from November 1972 through October 1974, with Ray Edenton, Leon Rhodes, Hal Rugg, Hargus Robbins and Vassar Clements among the players; they included “Wabash Cannonball,” “Fastest Grass Alive,” “Sledd Ridin’” and the 1974 single “Don’t Let the Smokey Mountain Smoke Get in Your Eyes” with “A Born Ramblin’ Man.”

In 1973 he also played drums for Lester Flatt at RCA’s Nashville studio, on sessions in January and September with Flatt’s Nashville Grass and on the July 1973 sessions for Flatt and Mac Wiseman’s Over the Hills to the Poorhouse; the September session produced “Never Ending Song of Love” and “Before You Go.” In 1979, at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville, he was the drummer when Mac Wiseman and the Osborne Brothers recorded their CMH double album, released as The Essential Bluegrass Album, with “Midnight Flyer” and “Little White Church” among its songs, and he added drums to a few tracks of the brothers’ instrumental album Bluegrass Concerto that year.

In 1981 he switched to guitar for Bobby & His Mandolin, a CMH album of fourteen fiddle tunes and Bobby’s own instrumentals such as “Cherokee Lady” and “Gatlinburg,” recorded at Cumberland Sound in Nashville with his brother Wynn Osborne on banjo, Kenny Baker on fiddle and Jimmy Brock on bass, and produced by Sonny Osborne. In January 2023, at the Jekyll Island Bluegrass Festival, Bobby Osborne’s band included his sons Robby, Wynn and Bobby Jr.