They were one of the only bluegrass groups playing arenas alongside loud country bands during the '60s and '70s. The Osbornes also experimented instrumentally. "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." "We knew then that we had caught onto something that.we had never heard before," he says. But while driving home from a gig, Bobby toyed with singing the melody on top. Everyone else in the genre sandwiched lead vocals between tenor and baritone parts. They started by trying a different approach to harmonizing. But when Bobby teamed up with his own brother, they were determined to set their music apart. Soon enough, he was sharing the stage with bluegrass pioneers Jimmy Martin and The Stanley Brothers. He gave up his honky-tonk dreams and shifted his focus to the high, lonesome singing and fleet-picking he heard Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys playing on the radio. "I wanted to stay low like Ernest Tubb, but it just changed and went up to the pitch it's at now." "But when I was about 16 I think, my voice all the sudden, it just changed overnight," Bobby says. Bobby was the older of the two and took to music first, mimicking the cavernous singing of Ernest Tubb. The song got so popular, audiences would demand to hear it multiple times in a single concert.īobby and Sonny Osborne grew up in rural Kentucky, then in Dayton, Ohio when the family migrated north. "And minutes after he played that, his switchboard lit right up, people calling in wanting to hear it again," Bobby says. The slower song got all the airplay until a well known Nashville DJ decided to flip the record over. Their record label paired "Rocky Top" with a ballad, and released the two-sided single on Christmas Day 1967. The Osborne Brothers came up with a different way of doing the song. He sang the words to it slow and played it slower and lower." "Boudleaux had kind of a low voice," Bobby remembers. It's still there, but the dead end has become a cul-de-sac.īobby stares out the car window, reminiscing about the afternoon that Boudleaux sat in an easy chair and strummed through an unfinished song he thought the brothers might like. The lakeside house once belonged to the legendary songwriting couple Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. The GPS guides us off a busy road and into a serene neighborhood.
"I think this was a big open field when I moved here," Bobby says about the Nashville suburb we are currently driving through. Bobby Osborne is trying to find his way back to the lakeside home where he first heard "Rocky Top," the song that would define his career as one half of the Osborne Brothers, one of bluegrass' most popular and innovative groups.
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