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| Husky Burnette Invades Maryville, TN And The Daily Times Wrote About It |
View this article on The Daily Times
"Brian “Husky” Burnette tried his luck at a number of occupations when he was a younger man. He went to a vocational high school, and a couple of years after graduation, he joined a carpenter’s union. He went to college for a little bit. He even was grandfathered into a sheet metal workers’ union because of his family, but none of them fit quite as right as a guitar does in his hands.
“Music’s my trade,” he told The Daily Times this
week. “I never thought, ‘OK, I’m gonna do this,’ even though it was
something I definitely wanted to do. I just don’t know how to do
anything else.” Burnette, who performs his particular brand of
gut-bucket blues on Friday night at Brackins in downtown Maryville,
comes from a musical family. Every member on his dad’s side did
something with music, he said, up to and including Johnny Burnette’s
Rock and Roll Trio, a rockabilly outfit from Memphis that pioneered the
sound around the time that a certain cat named Elvis Presley was
starting up. Growing up, Brian played in metal bands, but the blues was
never far from his wheelhouse, he said.
“I remember sitting on my bed growing up, listening
to blues records, and whenever I could get to a blues jam and had the
confidence to play out, that’s what I did,” he said. “I remember one day
I saw my buddy playing a metal-bodied resonator guitar at an open mic,
and I thought, ‘If he can do it, I can too.’”
Those were wild days, he added, and the trouble he
got into would provide fodder for his songs on down the road. Although
he plays the blues — rough-and-tumble, like Scott H. Biram or the Black
Diamond Heavies — he draws a lot of inspiration from singer-songwriters
like Guy Clark and Roger Alan Wade, he said.
“I’m a big lyric guy, and it means more to me to hear
a song that’s real and not made up,” he said. “There’s a couple of my
songs that get maybe a little too detailed, and some people may think
they’re made up, but they’re all real. I remember one time a guy with
the Chattanooga Times (Free Press) asked if I needed to keep getting in
trouble to write good songs, but the answer is no. I’ve got enough
subject matter to keep writing about that time in my life until the day I
die.”
That nickname, though — he’ll be the first to
sheepishly admit it’s not exactly the stuff of bare-knuckled legend. It
stems from the last band he was in, before he went solo, and he and the
rest of the guys were keen to crown one another with unique monikers.
“My mom worked for JC Penney back in the day in the
marketing department, and instead of hiring a bunch of kids to be in the
newspaper to wear all these clothes, they got all the employees’ kids
to model them — and I was the kid wearing the Husky pants!” he said with
a laugh. “I was telling that story while we were drinking and talking
about childhood nicknames, and the guys loved it. It’s nowhere near a
cool story. If I was just a fat kid in class, that’d be a cooler story!”
The band — Polecat Boogie Revival — did some cool
things, however, including touring with Hank 3; as a solo troubadour,
Burnette has shared the stage with a number of greats, including Guy
Clark, T-Model Ford, Emmylou Harris, Shooter Jennings, J.J. Grey &
Mofro and the legendary Leon Russell, for whom he opened a show last
summer at “The Shed” at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson in Maryville.
“Leon, for me, is one of my top three idols, and I
didn’t even ask for that gig — it just happened,” he said. “When they
let me know who I was opening for, I freaked out.”
Burnette, of course, held his own. Now a member of
the Rusty Knuckles label stable, he’s still touring on his most recent
album, “Tales From East End Blvd.,” riding the roads and playing
wherever will have him — preferably in the sorts of sketchy, backwater
places where the stage is set behind chicken wire, the floor boards
sweat spilled beer and the women smell like cheap perfume and
cigarettes, because that’s the sort of environment where his music seems
most at home.
“Sometimes I just describe myself as a black man
sitting on the porch,” he said. “He couldn’t tell you what chord he’s
playing or nothing; he just does it, and it comes out right. I’m not
saying that egotistically or anything; I just fell into this niche of
finally finding my style and my sound and just went with it, and it’s
working. I love it, and I love the realness of it.”
