[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGES Bellamy Brothers and Derrek Kupsih / Dkupish Productions”][/title]
Exactly three minutes into this interview, Howard Bellamy begged the reporter’s indulgence. He’d answered the call on his iWatch and after a couple of furtive attempts to communicate Dick Tracy-style, apologetically asked for a call-back when he could speak on a phone he could hear.
Sometimes, old-school really does sound the best.
“We came full circle,” Howard says to sum up the career he and brother David have crafted over the past four decades. “Dave and I the other day were talking about we were the outlaws of country when we first came in and now, we’ve somehow ended up some of the very few that are left of that era.”
It’s often necessary to hold music up to the candle flame of interpretation, to divine an artist’s true meaning from mere poetry. With the Bellamy Brothers, it never came to that. Everything you needed to know about them was right there in front of you. The themes weren’t particularly complicated – love, life and a damn good time – and that’s part of the charm. Mother Nature and Father Time complicated our lives enough, after all.
“We grew up with music; it was always in our family,” Howard says. “Our father was a rancher, but he always had music. Every weekend his buddies would come over and they had a little band. They would show us a few chords, we’d sing along as kids. And we sang in church very early as well.”
In between these sessions, the boys were exposed early to a rich melting pot of cultural influences surrounding them in their native central Florida.
“We owned a ranch and we had orange groves. The migrant workers from Jamaica used to come over and pick our fruit in the fall when it ripened,” Howard says. “Dave and I would get out and help pick and we’d hear them sing those island songs.”
“We also turned on to early rock and roll; we played almost all the old Jimmy Rogers songs. Jimmy Rogers was the foundation and we graduated up the ladder and got exposed to everything, so all of it rubbed off on us. It is kind of a gumbo, but it’s our gumbo.”
The duo honed their musical chops playing college gigs and festivals early on but, Howard says, never got a hint that music would be a career move. That changed in the 1970s when David penned “Spiders and Snakes” for Jim Stafford, a goofy romp that proved to be a big hit with more than three million units sold.
“That kind of gave us the idea maybe we can do this ourselves,” Howard says. “That was one of the things that prompted us to start our own career.”
Almost before they knew it the brothers had gone from guitar-plucking orange pickers to the rumored Next Big Thing in the music business. They relocated to California and fell into elite creative circles with the likes of Bob Dylan, James Taylor and Van Morrison. In 1976, “Let Your Love Flow,” their first single as a duo, exploded onto the charts worldwide, reaching the top spot in the U.S., Germany, Canada and Switzerland. Though they didn’t write the tune you couldn’t tell, so well did it capture the duo’s musical ethos: you could dance to it, you could drink to it, you could make love to it.
Entertainment history is littered with one-hit wonders, a tag the Bellamy Brothers avoided, though not immediately. Over their next ten singles, only two charted inside the top twenty domestically and did virtually nothing abroad. Then in 1979, the slyly worded “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me,” saw the duo return to form and unleashed a string of chart-toppers. The twosome had at least one number-one single for each of the next eight years – in all, twenty number ones over their career – and regularly charted top-tens through 1990.
The sustained success brought its own potential pitfalls, Howard says, and he credits the brothers’ ability to survive intact to their upbringing.
“We were living in L.A. when ‘Let Your Love Flow’ broke,” he says. “That was during the early to mid-seventies when all the craziness was going on and everybody was trying to kill themselves, just living hard. You get to those points in life and you realize I better reel this thing in.”
“It goes back to the way you were raised and knowing that we always had our little home place here in Florida that we came back to. It really grounded us. We live here now. It’s pretty down-to-earth; you get back here and you don’t feel like you ever left, even though we’ve played in seventy-two countries.”
The brothers never stopped recording, but the hits largely stopped coming as the fickle music world turned its attention to the next Next Big Thing. Ironically, some of the top-selling acts to follow did so in their oversized footprints as the Bellamy Brothers opened the door for the likes of genre-bending duos like The Judds, Brooks & Dunn, Montgomery Gentry and Big & Rich. Country superstar Blake Shelton unabashedly points to the Bellamy Brothers as a major influence and the two acts are currently sharing some tour dates.
“Our family always had a sense of humor. As I grow older now, I realize in the golden years you really need a sense of humor,” Howard says of the duo’s staying power. “Our dad always told stories; back then there wasn’t but three channels on TV and we didn’t even have a TV to start with. So, we were really family, which I think is something so important in our culture and something that’s disappearing.”
“We were the fortunate ones to have two great parents and they taught us how to work together and play together. And if you didn’t do what they said, they had a thing called a switch back then and they weren’t afraid to use it.”
What’s perhaps most remarkable about the Bellamy Brothers’ story is that unlike the protagonist in their hit “Old Hippie,” (“He’s an old hippie and he don’t know what to do/Should he hang on to the old, should he grab on to the new?”) the Bellamys have transitioned gracefully and astutely into other ventures.
In 2018, they published Let Your Love Flow,: The Life and Times of the Bellamy Brothers, a book detailing their careers in the music business. That same year, they starred in Honky Tonk Ranch, their own reality TV series. The show became the highest-rated program on the Cowboy Channel and was recently picked up by the Circle Network, owned by Opryland, for another two seasons.
And, as a quick peek on YouTube will tell you, the boys haven’t lost a step in the recording department, either. The voices are just as pure, the perspective wiser, more knowing. Time may have given them a few body blows, but even these the brothers find a way to turn into art.
“You just have to repace and sometimes you have good days and sometimes you just wonder what you’re trying to prove,” Howard says of getting older. “But, so far so good. Every now and then we have to clean our spark plugs. You learn how to deal with it as you go.”
“We have a fairly new CD out called Over the Moon. We’re playing some songs in the show from that now and it’s doing really well around the world. We just recently wrote three songs and all three of them are about the best three songs written together in a long time.”
Fort Smith audiences will get to see the duo in April when they perform a benefit concert for Good Samaritan Clinic, just one of about one hundred and fifty dates the brothers still play annually. After all of these years, playing is still what these two dancin’ cowboys do best and what they want their legacy to be about.
“I see people passing on, huge celebrities, and they’ll get two or three days of big news and then it just ends up being gone and done. That’s kind of the way our life is,” Howard says. “A lot of times people have an image of you, you know? Lord only knows what image they have of us. I have no idea, because we’ve done so many different kinds of things.”
“So, just being a better person and leaving the world a better place is kind of the goal. That’s always a work in progress.”
Get your tickets now for Best Night of the Year: An Evening with The Bellamy Brothers, a fundraiser benefitting Good Samaritan Fort Smith. The event will be held April 24, 2020, at 7PM, at Kay Rodgers Park Expo Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Tickets can be purchased by calling 479.783.0233 or visit goodsamaritanfs.com.
