Jethro Burns
Burns’s new album has just arrived, and it is among the best of his career. The only problem is, Burns is dead, and has been for six years. The irony is that this disc would never have been made if he were alive. Burns was considered a musical giant long before he died, but his impending death was the catalyst that brought about the sessions that have recently been issued as Swing Low, Sweet Mandolin on Acoustic Disc.
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By the late 1980s, when these sessions were recorded, Burns had long been revered by legions of musicians as the world’s greatest mandolinist. Though the late Steve Goodman had exposed listeners to Burns by using him as an honored sideman for studio and tour work, Burns’s public profile was by then a faint shadow of what it had been from the late 1930s into the 1960s. But even back then many of his fans, only dimly aware of his abilities as a picker, knew him best as a grinner. Burns was half of the musical comedy duo Homer & Jethro, which released 35 albums, were fixtures on radio and TV, won a Grammy, and even starred in a series of commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. To H & J lovers, Burns was a hilarious, wisecracking funnyman who happened to play mandolin. Those fans made him a superstar in his day, but it was brilliant mandolin playing that made him a musical legend.
Soon Burns was playing on countless recordings as a session musician, and occasionally he and Haynes and Atkins would use leftover studio time to record instrumental jazz and country tunes. These tracks would be issued in tiny quantities by RCA without publicity, and then disappear from the catalog. This was the fate of the “String Dustin’” EP in 1954.
Unlike with many artists, one need not look to the early years to find prime playing by Burns, because his prime period never ended. Nowhere is this more obvious than on Swing Low, Sweet Mandolin. Knowing that cancer would soon take his life, Burns told Stiernberg to “get some microphones and come over” to his Evanston home to do some recording. He also told Stiernberg to bring his guitar. The setting was familiar, the partner was an excellent musician and a close friend, and the tunes they recorded were ones Burns had loved for most of his life. These recordings were to be, in a very real sense, the last testament of a man whose music career spanned 57 years. The duo setting, with Stiernberg’s Djangoesque guitar prodding Burns’s mandolin, allowed Burns some of the openness of unaccompanied playing at which he excelled, while also offering him the added rhythmic drive provided by the stylistically simpatico partner he had come to know in Stiernberg.
