There was a high lonesome echo this week when iconic bluegrass elders Jesse McReynolds and Bobby Osborne passed away within days of each other. Both were mandolin innovators born in the rural south on the eve of the Great Depression. Both enjoyed long careers making music with their brothers - joining the Grand Ole Opry and the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame - and both soldiered on as solo artists after their siblings could no longer work.
As a historical matter, McReynolds and Osborne’s brother bands shaped the first generation of bluegrass music, with original spins on the driving style forged by Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs in the years after WWII. Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys launched out of southwestern Virginia with gentlemanly vocals and Jesse’s signature mandolin style. The Osborne Brothers played hillbilly music for their fellow displaced Appalachians in southwestern Ohio on their way to a long career defined by mesmerizing stacked harmonies and the judicious use of drums.
Jesse McReynolds died on Friday at his longtime Gallatin farm at the age of 93. While the music community was still absorbing that news, it was announced that Jesse’s close friend Bobby Osborne had passed away - also in Gallatin - at 91 years old on Tuesday. Tributes poured in as the roots music community remembered both fondly as artists and men.
“In my opinion, the Osborne Brothers were the best harmony singers in bluegrass music history!” said Ricky Skaggs in a statement honoring Bobby Osborne. “They made us all wanna be better singers…They had so many cool configurations of harmony that it set them apart from anyone else in bluegrass and country music. Not only was Bobby a powerhouse singer, but he was another link in the chain of bluegrass mandolin players. He was great, a real stylist.”
“Jesse (McReynolds) changed the mandolin world forever with his brilliant, banjo-like cross-picking,” wrote fellow mandolinist Sierra Hull on Facebook. “I’ll never forget talking to him about how he still practiced daily even in his 80s and loved every minute spent with the instrument in his hands. Even as he grew older and his hands less able, he found ways to change his technique so he could still make the music he loved. That positive attitude just radiated from him.”
McReynolds was born in 1929 and grew up in the mountains of Virginia not far from the home of the Stanley Brothers. After a car accident when he was 14, he had the time to focus on music, and when his brother Jim got out of the Army, they joined forces with a mission to become entertainers. They honed a new string band sound working many regional radio stations until they landed a recording contract with Capitol Records in 1952 and later membership in the Opry in 1964 (the same year as the Osborne Brothers). Jim & Jesse scored hits with “Cotton Mill Man,” “Are You Missing Me,” and John Prine’s “Paradise.” They cut an album of Chuck Berry songs and experimented with electric instruments in a country/bluegrass hybrid sound.
Throughout, one instantly recognizable color of Jim & Jesse music was Jesse’s cross-picked mandolin, a flow of arpeggios modeled on a banjo roll that offered a strikingly different feel than the dominant style pioneered by Bill Monroe. McReynolds also developed a signature “split-string” technique that let him get different notes out of paired strings that are usually fretted together. Both approaches can be heard on his original instrumental “Okeechobee Wind.”
Jim and Jesse received the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997, four years after their induction to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Jim passed away in 2002, leaving Jesse to pursue a solo career in his later years, a stretch that included a mandolin duo album with Bobby Osborne in 2001 an album of Grateful Dead covers in 2010.
The Osborne Brothers became possibly the most influential bluegrass band in history after Flatt & Scruggs thanks to their precise three-part vocals and their open-minded approach to repertoire. Bobby Osborne dropped out of high school to form a band with his brother Sonny in the 1940s. When the family joined a working-class exodus to the industrial belt of Ohio, they contributed to a vibrant music scene where bluegrass was taking new shapes. Their progress was put on pause while Bobby served two years with the Marines in Korea where he earned a Purple Heart. When he returned, Sonny had been playing with Bill Monroe, and the brothers took their spot in the top tiers of bluegrass via the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, WV.
Bobby told NPR in 2017 how he and Sonny came up with a new vocal feel by moving the lead melody line from the middle of a three-part song to the highest part, something he tried driving home from a show. "We knew then that we had caught onto something that...we had never heard before," he said. "So we got the guitar out of the trunk and found out what key we was in, and we sang that song all the way home so we would not forget that type of harmony because that's what we wanted to do."
With Sonny’s powerhouse banjo playing, Bobby’s soaring lead vocals, and a strong repertoire of songs, the Osborne Brothers became exemplars of the bluegrass genre. They broke out on record in 1956 with the MGM single “Ruby Are You Mad” followed by the ballad “Once More.” They made history with “Rocky Top,” written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant and released first by the Osbornes in 1967. It was made an official state song of Tennessee and helped the brothers become the first bluegrass band to play at the White House in 1973.
Sonny Osborne retired in 2005 and passed away in 2021. Bobby continued to play with his band the Rocky Top X-press, which included two of his sons.
Mandolinists and fans of American string music will be learning from Bobby Osborne and Jesse McReynolds as long as pickers are picking.
Correction: Jesse McReynolds lived and died in Gallatin, TN, not Goodlettsville as noted in the original story.
