Willie Brewster

The Brewster Brothers began in 1940 with Willie and his older brother Ray, who played guitar; they picked up an early sponsor at the Knoxville radio station WROL and became part of the group of acts Cas Walker promoted on his shows. For a time they were merged into the Happy Valley Boys with the Bailey Brothers, and when Charles Bailey was drafted and the Brewsters’ name moved to the front, Willie switched from fiddle to mandolin. Ray died in 1948, and Willie worked for a while as a sideman with the Bailey Brothers.

In the early 1950s he and Bud started the Brewster Brothers again, with the banjo player Johnnie Whisnant, as the Brewster Brothers & the Smoky Mountain Hillbillies, broadcasting over WROS in Scottsboro, Alabama, then in Birmingham and in Virginia, before settling back in Knoxville, where their work with Cas Walker went on for about two decades. They also recorded with the Webster Brothers, Audie and Earl, as the Brewster Brothers & Four Brothers Quartet, for the Acme label.

Carl Story first used the brothers on a session on 25 February 1957 in Nashville, with Willie on mandolin, Bud on banjo, Claude Boone on bass and Tater Tate on fiddle, which produced Story’s first bluegrass banjo records, “Mocking Banjo” and “Banjo on the Mountain,” along with “Light at the River” and “Got a Lot to Tell Jesus,” for Mercury. On 8 October 1958, at the WFLW studio in Monticello, Kentucky, the same lineup recorded “Who Will Sing for Me,” “Angel Band,” “Paul and Silas” and “Old Country Baptizing” for Starday, and many of Story’s dozen Starday albums of the next decade featured the Brewsters and Boone. Get Religion and Everybody Will Be Happy (both 1961) were recorded at radio station WCRS in Greenwood, South Carolina, in November and December 1960, with Willie on mandolin and Bud on banjo; Mighty Close to Heaven (1963), cut at Starday’s Nashville studio in November 1962, added Tommy Jackson on fiddle; and Sacred Songs of Life & the Hereafter (1965) and There’s Nothing on Earth That Heaven Can’t Cure (1965) followed from sessions in May 1964 and March 1965.

In 1964 Willie and Bud sang harmony for Story at Columbia’s Nashville studio, and in 1966 the three recorded Carl Story and the Rambling Mountaineers Sing the Gospel Songs You Ask For, billed with the Brewster Brothers, at the Rimrock studio in Concord, Arkansas; Old Homestead reissued it in 1980. A session at Columbia in September 1966 put the brothers alongside the drummer D.J. Fontana and the fiddler Buddy Spicher, and they recorded with Story at Starday again in August 1967. Bud later said the brothers had cut more than 300 sides with Story. Willie retired from music in the late 1960s. His son Paul Brewster became a tenor singer and guitarist with the Osborne Brothers and, for twenty-five years, Ricky Skaggs’s Kentucky Thunder.