Junior Brown: An Uncommon Guitarist

Junior Brown, a country icon, may not be the first act you’d think of to play at a highly touted jam event — the 10,000 Lakes Festival in Detroit Lakes MN later this month — but, Junior Brown will most definitely be someone these music fans will want to hear.

Brown is the second country act to stride across a 10KLF stage. Shooter Jennings, son of the late country icon Waylon Jennings, put his swagger into some very hip country/rock at the Soo Pass Ranch in 2006 and even was the cause of a wild call for a rock-off by the White Iron Band (which said Minnesotans should have been happy Shooter wasn’t there to witness or those bad boys might have gotten more than their guitars whipped!). But Shooter has always walked the edge between country and rock, wailing out lyrics about cocaine and women that many a country performer would shy away from.

Junior Brown, however, has a handle on pure country, particularly classic country styles of the 50s and 60s. If you listen closely to the few vocals he does, you’ll hear a very definite Ernest Tubb quality, captured in tone and phrasing. His songs deal less with cheating and drinking as they do with absurd characters with an occasional love ballad thrown in.

“There are a lot of things I don’t write, that I won’t write about,” Brown admitted in a recent phone interview. “So that just leaves mainly humor. So, I wrote a lot of songs with sort of funny stories to them.”

One of them is his “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead.” But his most famous, “Highway Patrol,” wasn’t written by him, but by Red Simpson. “A lot of people think I did because I made it my own, and it’s so much my style,” Brown said.

But Brown’s biggest appeal isn’t his lyrics or his vocals. At 10KLF, he will probably stir a lot of musician envy when he brings out his signature guit-steel, a two-necked contraption built by Michael Stevens that combines a standard six-string guitar with a steel guitar, both of which are amplified. Brown said that having it made eliminated the need to decide which guitar to use on which song and allowed him to play both guitar styles during a single song. The result is pure genius.

“He’s working on a new one for me now that has pedals,” Brown said. “It’s really a contraption.”

And Brown wrangles that guitar invention like no two guitarists ever could. He can dip into high-speed renditions of old chestnuts like “Sugarfoot Rag” and then offer a medley of classic rock tunes that would make Hendrix and Clapton weep. And his audiences love it.

“They like the variety, being surprised by things I guess,” He said. “That guitar helps you do that and pull out old songs that they recognize.”

Ironically, this A-list country artist didn’t come from Appalachia, but was born in Arizona, lived on the East Coast and finally came to rest in Santa Fe, NM. Equally, ironic, Junior Brown wasn’t raised on country with a family that played banjo on the pickin’ porch. His parents were classical musicians who felt that the early country music of the 50s and 60s was really folk music and much more acceptable than the emerging, irreverent new music, rock and roll. Country and rock are very glad Junior Brown honed his chops on Chet Atkins and other guitar wizards of the time. And today’s festival audiences are soaking up every note.

Who: Junior Brown

When: Thursday, July 23, 11:30 pm

Where: Barn Stage, 10KLF, Soo Pass Ranch, Detroit Lakes MN

Tickets: http://www.10klf.com