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When country wasn't cool: Junior Brown stuck by his guns to become a popular touring and recording artist (Alan Sculley, 12/12/02, Cincinnati City Beat)

These days, Junior Brown is one of the coolest artists on the Country scene -- at least to people whose tastes lean away from the Pop-inflected Country that populates mainstream Country radio and toward the twangier traditional sounds of years gone by.

With his guit-steel guitar, Brown's one-of-a-kind double-neck instrument that combines both a traditional electric guitar and a steel guitar, his snazzy suit and cowboy attire and a wry, yet folksy sense of humor, Brown has been one of the most unique -- and acclaimed -- artists to arrive on the national scene over the past decade.

But Brown remembers a time when he was anything but hip -- namely in the late 1980s when he first put together a band and began playing on the usually progressive-thinking Austin, Texas, music scene.

"When I started my own band it was frustrating because they (audiences) would yell for Rock & Roll and I just kind of played traditional Country," Brown, 49, recalls. "They would laugh at me. 'Hey, play us some Rock & Roll, will you?' (I'd answer) 'Well, why don't you go watch MTV? This is a Country band.'

"Then they'd make fun of me singing an Ernest Tubb song or something," the affable singer-guitarist says. "They'd be making their little chicken moves out there, like they were really hip and I was real square. So that made me angry, and I would reach down and turn that amp all the way up and just blast them. 'You want some Rock & Roll, here it is.' And in doing that, I actually stumbled on a style.

If Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, George Jones and Dolly Parton weren't all still around, Junior Brown would be the best act in Country music. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2002 1:40 PM