|
Pinnacle Boy
Bud Brewster helped put Knoxville on the bluegrass map
by Mike Gibson
Bud Brewster apologizes to his mid-afternoon visitor for not being a good host, even as he does all of the things one might expect a gracious, practiced host to do, offering refreshments and a comfortable chair in his well-appointed living room. He’s disarmingly deferential, a man of easy politesse.
That kind of humility is rare in musicians of Brewster’s accomplishment; the 67-year-old picker and singer is a seminal figure in bluegrass, a veteran of two long-running, successful traditional music outfits. He’s a local icon as well, one of the staples of Knoxville politician and entrepreneur Cas Walker’s ground-breaking TV and radio country music broadcasts, and the long-time president/chief stockholder of Pick ‘n’ Grin music store. Today he stays active locally with the local Pick ‘n’ Grin Bluegrass Band, a five-piece outfit that also includes bluegrass fiddle stalwart Taylor Tate.
“This is how you get to be a star in bluegrass,” Brewster chuckles. “You live so long that everybody has to know you.”
Born on a farm in Loudon County, Brewster was inspired to pick up a guitar by his brothers Ray and Willie, both of whom were more than 10 years his senior, and both of whom played on the country radio broadcasts that Walker pioneered and hosted on WROL. “I saw them driving new cars, wearing new suits, and I was here on the farm wading knee-deep in mud,” Brewster remembers. “I wanted to get me some of that.”
He took to singing and picking with other area musicians, and eventually banded with brother Willie to form Bill and Bud the Brewster Brothers and the Smoky Mountain Hillbillies in 1953. The brothers spent the better part of a year playing for a couple of radio stations in Alabama before moving to Knoxville to work with Walker again.
Walker’s broadcasts were a revolving door for both up-and-coming and established bluegrass and country musicians: “Knoxville used to be the place to go if you wanted to play bluegrass,” Brewster says. “It was like the Grand Ole Opry at one time.”
One established player who passed through was singer/bandleader Carl Story, a popular recording artist in the realm of Gospel bluegrass. Story invited the Brewsters to join his Rambling Mountaineers, and together they recorded more than 30 records over the next eight years on Mercury, Stardog, and a string of small independent labels.
Bud took up five-string banjo for the Story gig; the first single he cut with the band was “Mocking Banjo,” a new arrangement of a mid-‘50s Arthur Smith tune called “Feuding Banjos.” Their version would later be the template for the Dillards’ “Dueling Banjos,” a 1960s bluegrass radio hit that became popularly recognized with its inclusion on the soundtrack of the movie Deliverance in 1972. Brewster says many of the song’s trademark licks—the carefully enunciated opening call-and-response, as well as the subsequent “Yankee Doodle” breakdown—were Brewster touches.
“I still get an occasional royalty check in the mail,” Brewster says. “A lot of it is mine and Willie’s work, stuff we added to Arthur Smith’s version.”
Tired of constant travel, the brothers came home around 1962 and resumed their roles as Walker regulars, playing the grocer’s radio shows on WROL and then WIVK, and also his TV broadcasts, including the popular “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour” on WBIR.
“He treated me fine; the biggest problem with Cas was that he would not overpay you,” Brewster says of working with the famously irascible Walker. “He would get his money’s worth out of you. He watched his nickels and dimes, he sure did.”
Raising a family and in need of steadier income, Brewster worked in construction beginning in 1970, and didn’t so much as touch a musical instrument for more than two years. His return to the life of a touring musician came almost inadvertently when he joined a band called the Pinnacle Boys with locals Larry Mathis, Jerry Moore, Randall Collins and Jim Smith in 1973. The venture began in a spirit of fun, with modest aspirations, until the group made the fateful decision to record an album. “I’ll be durned if we didn’t up and have a hit,” Brewster says. “Then we were back to playing all over the country again.”
Their successful first single, the title song of their debut album Uncle Pen (a Bill Monroe original), signaled another long, successful ride for Brewster: The Pinnacle Boys reigned as one of the nation’s preeminent bluegrass acts, recording nine records in nine years, first on Georgia’s Atteiram, and then on Rounder Records. They toured extensively, playing weekend festivals, churches, bars, and radio-sponsored bluegrass shows, which were often held in school auditoriums. “Those were always a mess; get in there and the sound bouncing from one end of the gym to the other,” Brewster remembers. “You couldn’t hear yourself or nobody else.”
The ‘80s and ‘90s were given over to managing Pick ‘n’ Grin, which Brewster had purchased in 1980. He continued to play on and off around town, however, first with the Knoxville Bluegrass Band, and later with Pick ‘n’ Grin Bluegrass Band. Brewster says PNGBB members hope to release at least a couple of recordings locally, although he promises there won’t be any surprise hits this time; his days of traveling to big festival shows are finally come to an end.
“If you want to play festivals, play out of town at all, you have to be making phone calls, working; you have to be involved in it all the way,” Brewster says. “At my age, it’s tiresome to be traveling a lot, sitting around fairgrounds waiting to play. When you’re tired and you want to be home with mama and the babies, it gets old.”
July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30
© 2004 Metro Pulse
|
| 
