Sonny Osborne

William Harrison, 1933, author and screenwriter.

Sonny Osborne, 1937, bluegrass singer, banjo player, and founding member of the Osborne Brothers.

Lee Clayton, 1942, country musician and songwriter who wrote hits for Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

Bob Ross, 1942, painter and host of The Joy of Painting.

And it was a real breakthrough for the Osborne brothers.

This is with Bobby Osborne, Sonny Osborne and Red Allen Osborne.

Once more this became a hit for them and of course it's still sung by lots of people now.

And here are the Graskills doing it from industrial strength bluegrass and it sounds great.

I mean, and things change cause it's like the way things are recorded, uh, you get different levels of fidelity and therefore you don't need it to be so loud or, you know, whatever, you can get away with different things.

Um, you know, and then different players have different, I mean, Sonny Osborne had super heavy strings and Earl didn't and blah, blah, blah.

Everyone's always kind of saying, you know, well, this is exactly how so-and-so did it.

It was like, yeah, well, they had a different, you know, the instrument was set up differently and it was recorded differently and maybe into like a single microphone or whatever, you know, so there's all this stuff that, that can make a huge difference with that.

He bought a Wade Ray Fiddlin' album, which is funny.

Later on in years, I was talking about it, and Sonny Osborne told me he played banjo on that album.

Wade Ray Fiddlin' album.

And the other album, I remember dad was so excited.

Because I knew that song.

The Osborne brothers had it out, Bob and Sonny Osborne.

They'd had it out as a big hit everywhere.

Everybody was playing it on the radio.

... between the fifth fret and the end of the f- fingerboard, and so I've had to relearn a lot of how to move up and down the neck, and still I can't do some things the way that I did it at some time, but it changed the way I played.

I had to kinda throw out the window how did Earl Scruggs do this or how did Sonny Osborne do this, 'cause it couldn't be done that way.

Oh.

And but it opened me up to be able to play things more the way I just heard them, you know, or wanted to play them.

Like, I've just gotten to the point where it's, you know...

There's a great banjo player named Sonny Osborne.

He, and, um, I got to know him a little bit, and he was one of the great bluegrass banjo players in the sort of the second wave.

So after, after Bill Monroe with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, you know, then you get the Osborne brothers, and Jimmy Martin, the Sunny Mountain Boys, and you know, like-

... more members.

But behind you, you can see some of our greats, uh, that have been inducted here, from Don Vappie, who's an amazing four-string player, to Sonny Osborne, who I mentioned.

Our executive director even got inducted-

Oh, wow