C.J. Lewandowski
Bio
Introduction
By Daniel Mullins
Real Roots Radio, Xenia, OH
There was only one Bobby Osborne. Few people in bluegrass carried with them a larger-than-life aura (the inspiration behind countless tall tales still told with wonder) while also maintaining a down-to-earth approachability that impacted generations of bluegrass lovers. That’s part of why this collection of music is so special — it is not only Bobby Osborne’s swan song but also serves as a celebration of his impact on the past, present, and future of bluegrass, eight decades after his powerful voice first captivated lovers of hillbilly music.
One of bluegrass music’s few stars who continued performing into their nineties, Bobby Osborne was born in Thousandsticks, Kentucky (near Hyden), but spent much of his formative years in the Dayton, Ohio area. While a teenager, a local talent scout brought a young Bobby Osborne to radio station WPFB in Middletown, Ohio to perform on air in front of a live audience packed under tent on the station’s grounds during one of their weekly Saturday night jamboree-style shows. The crowd wouldn’t stop clapping and the station’s phone lines wouldn’t stop ringing after Bobby sang “Ruby”. In essence, his musical journey began that fateful night, altering the history of American roots music over the ensuing decades and touching the lives of countless folks who heard his remarkable voice and inventive mandolin stylings. One of those folks was C.J. Lewandowski, whose friendship with Bobby during the legend’s final years serves as the impetus behind this album coming to fruition.
This project is aptly titled Keep On Keepin’ On. This adage is fitting as we look at Bobby’s personal career, and the way that motto is embodied through C.J. Lewandowski’s determination in carrying Bobby’s influence forward since his hero's passing. Bobby Osborne’s life and legacy are both filled with lessons in persistence. A hero of the Korean War, he had been reported missing in action during a mission gone awry but defied the odds in a heroic return to base while carrying a severely wounded comrade back to safety, saving the soldier’s life.
Musically, while Bobby Osborne’s career is filled with some well-documented highs as one of bluegrass music’s most commercially successful artists, it is also filled with surprising adversity that often preceded some of his most remarkable moments.
In the late-fifties, The Osborne Brothers and Red Allen were desperately trying to find a song that would break them onto the country charts; they would record “Once More”, their first to feature their “high lead” trio (a style of harmony singing which they would popularize), becoming their highest charting single and cracking the Top 15 on the Billboard Country Singles charts.
In the early-sixties, The Osborne Brothers were on the brink of starving out — Bobby was driving a taxi cab in Dayton just to help make ends meet; his brother, Sonny called The Wilburn Brothers who had offered to help Bobby and Sonny should they need it, and in the coming months, they would be made members of the Grand Ole Opry and change record labels, entering into a new era of commercial success which yielded fifteen charting singles on the country charts over the next decade.
Shortly after the turn of the century, Sonny Osborne decided to retire from the road, ending an historic musical partnership; Bobby sojourned on, leading Bobby Osborne & The Rocky Top X-Press until his passing.
Roughly a decade after leading his solo career and five years since his last album, Bobby Osborne had grown discouraged with a lack of opportunities for an elder statesman of the Grand Ole Opry; he then partnered with producer Alison Brown to release Original, resulting in a Grammy nomination, a royal appearance at Bonnaroo, and the first solo award of his illustrious career.
For C.J. Lewandowski, the making of this record provided his own experience in resilience. C.J. had long wanted to record with Bobby Osborne, hoping to one day record a song or two with the legend. When he first began discussing a potential solo project with Keith Barnacastle of Turnberry Records, that was the original goal — to maybe have Bobby Osborne as a special guest on a handful of songs. Quickly, that initial idea transformed into something much more.
Bobby Osborne had taken C.J. Lewandowski under his wing, just as he had many bluegrassers over the years. Bobby’s father, Robert Osborne had been a schoolteacher in Leslie County, Kentucky, before he moved the family to Dayton, Ohio for a good-paying factory job at National Cash Register, when Bobby was just a boy. Bobby carried on that legacy of teaching the next generation. Professionally, he was an instructor at the Kentucky School of Bluegrass & Traditional Music (where he taught others about the music he loved, in the same building where his father at taught school decades earlier) and guiding those who worked with The Osborne Brothers and Bobby Osborne & The Rocky Top X-Press over the years. Personally, Bobby took time to encourage those that followed in his footsteps, impacting generations of bluegrass musicians including Rhonda Vincent, Larry Stephenson, Glen Duncan, Joe Mullins, The Grascals, Scott Napier, and countless more. Bobby Osborne would shepherd C.J. Lewandowski in the same way.
C.J. Lewandowski grew up in Jefferson County, Missouri, bordering the Ozark Mountains and Mark Twain National Forest. After losing his mother at a young age, he saw O Brother, Where Art Thou at a local movie house, and he was instantly drawn to the music of this Coen Brothers cult classic. He then began hanging around the old timers in his community who were engaged with the bluegrass scene regionally and nationally. He found solace and comfort in the strong sense of community that bluegrass music offered, and dove in headfirst, often looking to those who walked the paths before him for wisdom and guidance, learning from bluegrass veterans such as Jim Orchard, Karl Shifflet, Tommy Brown, and the late, James King. His bluegrass journey would eventually lead him to East Tennessee, where he was presented with the opportunity to form a house bluegrass band for Ole Smoky Moonshine Distillery in Gatlinburg, as a means of drawing crowds to their storefront to sample liquor: The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys were formed. C.J. and the band would perform hours at a time, multiple days a week, and only mere steps away from the historic Gatlinburg Inn, where Country Music Hall of Fame members, Felice and Boudeleaux Bryant wrote “Rocky Top”, which would go on to be a massive hit for The Osborne Brothers and arguably the most well-known bluegrass song of all time. Little did C.J. know that years later, he would spend countless hours at the home of the man whose iconic voice solidified “Rocky Top” as a standard, learning invaluable lessons from the bluegrass master, and that C.J. would join the legend in the studio the final time he recorded this American anthem.
In 2010, while he was honing his craft, C.J. Lewandowski began taking mandolin lessons from Bobby Osborne through the Kentucky School of Bluegrass & Traditional Music. This was just the beginning of an impactful friendship that shaped the lives of both C.J. and Bobby. C.J.’s musical opportunities quickly began taking off, and he was only a student of Bobby’s for a short time. They remained in touch over the years and would occasionally see one another at festivals. C.J. made a trip to Nashville in early 2019 to purchase a dream mandolin of his — an early Fern. Bobby Osborne owned the most famous early Fern model mandolin in bluegrass, so C.J. reached out to the Grand Ole Opry star to tell him about his new acquisition. Much to C.J.’s surprise, Bobby invited him to come over to the house before he left town, so Bobby could take a look at C.J.’s new mandolin. This meeting at Bobby’s place would be the first of many. Bobby would often have C.J. over to his house to pick mandolins and share stories, creating memories that would forever change this young mandolin player from Missouri. Bobby and C.J.’s bond only strengthened during the worldwide pandemic. Being an elder statesman of American roots music, opportunities for Bobby to perform after March 2020 became much fewer in an effort to protect his health while a global pandemic was raging outside. This devastated Bobby, but C.J. encouraged him that the phone wasn’t ringing due to how much people cared for Bobby and his health, rather than a lack of demand. As C.J. began discussing with his mentor the notion of going into the studio together, the idea of a full-fledged collaborative album between he and Bobby began to take shape.
The project was initially announced in a Facebook video on January 25th, 2023. It was billed as a celebration of Bobby and C.J.’s friendship and love of mandolins — to which Bobby said, “That suits me just fine,” with a grin. The album clearly fired up this roots music icon, not only by his beaming smile in the announcement video but evidenced by his performance on the recording. C.J. Lewandowski, the top-notch house band made up of some of the top young pickers in bluegrass (primarily Aynsley Porchak, Avery Welter, Lincoln Hensley, Wyatt Ellis, and Bobby Osborne Jr.), and Ben Surratt as engineer placed much care in making a ninety-one year old Bobby Osborne as comfortable as possible, with a noted emphasis on Bobby’s comfort in the studio — making Bobby sound his absolute best was the priority, and the amount of time that did or did not take was a secondary concern. If that meant that Bobby wasn’t feeling great that day, and the band laid down tracks and enjoyed having Bobby as their audience, that is what they did. If Bobby was having fun sharing stories to the group of millennials in the studio about how the music business used to be, that’s fine too. And the days that Bobby sat down and sang his hind end off while the young musicians listened with glee, that’s when history was made, and it’s captured on this album. During the spring of 2023, these recording sessions yielded eight solid tracks featuring Bobby Osborne; they would prove to be the final recordings of his illustrious career.
Bobby Osborne passed away June 27th, 2023. He was a giant in bluegrass and country music, and his passing left a lasting hole in the hearts of bluegrass lovers everywhere. For C.J. Lewandowski, someone Bobby had referred to as his “best friend” just a few days before his passing, the passing of his mentor was painful. C.J. was truly at a loss. He struggled for months, wondering where to go and what to do next, even nearly quitting the music business entirely. He wondered how he would go on personally, let alone what to do with his and Bobby’s unfinished album. One night, he was sitting alone on his porch in the Smoky Mountains, when, as C.J. puts it, it felt as if Bobby was sitting next to him. He claims that Bobby told him “I gave you something, now do what you want to with it.” Over the coming weeks, the words wouldn’t leave his mind. He began to chew on what that could mean, when things began to come into focus for C.J. — while he couldn’t make this album with Bobby anymore, he could finish it for Bobby. It was as if this was Bobby’s way of encouraging C.J. to “keep on keepin’ on.”
Rather than just finish and release the original eight tracks, C.J. decided to expand the scope of album’s concept to also serve as a celebration of Bobby Osborne’s enduring influence on American music, inviting friends and music makers from a variety of eras to appear on the album. The all-star cast includes members of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Country Music Hall of Fame, stars of Bobby’s beloved Grand Ole Opry, Grammy award-winners, members of The Rocky Top X-Press, Bobby’s sons, and many other friends and fans of Bobby Osborne. A testament to Bobby’s continuing influence on bluegrass, at least a dozen of the performers on Keep On Keepin’ On are under the age of forty (including Lewandowski), underscoring the resounding impact Bobby Osborne’s music has made on the current crop of roots music makers — nearly eighty years since he was first heard as a teenager under a crowded tent on WPFB radio.
Bobby Osborne’s mark on bluegrass is branded by steadfast perseverance and fierce passion - for both the music and its people. This legacy has even resonated within the hallowed halls of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum, who highlighted Bobby Osborne and C.J. Lewandowski’s friendship and shared pursuit for promoting and preserving bluegrass music and its traditions in the museum’s popular American Currents: State of the Music exhibit in 2024. Even if Bobby is no longer with us, the power of his music and friendship always will be, and the imprint of Bobby’s musical fingerprints will continue to be felt all over the future of bluegrass music, ensuring that Bobby Osborne’s legacy will continue “keep on keepin’ on.”