YouTube Gold: Junior Brown Gets Down

There aren’t many musicians who can do what Junior Brown does

Junior Brown is more or less classified as a country musician - the hat kind of gives it away - but like his contemporaries Lyle Lovett and kd lang, it’s somewhat of a limiting label.

Brown’s band is minimal: there’s a stand up base, one snare drum (not a kit, just the one) and his wife/manager is on rhythm guitar. And there is definitely a passion for country music, but you might say he’s in country, not of country.

His interests go much farther than country.

Brown’s father, Samuel, was a musicologist and professor and he took to music early. The instrument he plays here he calls the Guit-steel and says it came to him in a dream and he had it built.

Brown does play a lot of country but it can be a bit campy. He clearly honors it but doesn’t hesitate to play with the form.

And he can play just about any style of music. He is a mean blues guitarist and can rock with the best of them.

In the video we have today, he plays a surf medley that dips into Dick Dale, Secret Agent Man and The Ventures. It’s a pretty long way from country, but really, for someone with this much talent, one genre would be pretty confining.