Pine Ridge Boys bring old time country blues to Folklore Center

Pine Ridge Boys

When one thinks of Mississippi music, the blues inevitably come to mind first. But the Magnolia State has a rich tradition in a variety of genres, including country music.

“People think of the blues, but you know Jimmie Rodgers was from Mississippi,” says Lisa Lambert of Dennis, Miss., a country musician and longtime blues fan who discovered how closely related the two were when she joined up with the old-time country outfit the Pine Ridge Boys three years ago. “As we were learning these old songs, I’d recognize it as a blues song. They don’t recognize it when I call out a blues song, but we both know the lyrics. There’re so many songs that have crossed genres through the years.”

Pine Ridge Boys

Saturday, Lambert and the Pine Ridge Boys will bring their take on Mississippi country music to the Center For Southern Folklore.

The Pine Ridge Boys are something of a Mississippi country music institution. The group’s origins reach back to the late 1940s when high school friends Bryan Sparks and Buford Wells formed a hillbilly band in Belmont in Tishomingo Country, Miss., near the Alabama state line. In 1949, that group became the Pine Ridge Boys and began barnstorming the Southeast.

In the mid 1950s, the band’s regional popularity led to its own live television show on a station in nearby Tupelo. Their show came on before that of bluegrass superstars Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who, in the days before videotape, had to travel to six cities — including Tupelo — weekly to perform their syndicated program live.

“The big joke was that every time Flatt and Scruggs would come in the station, they’d have a couple of pieces of mail in their box and the Pine Ridge Boys’ mailbox would be full,” says Lambert. “Flatt and Scruggs would want to know who these guys were.”

Eventually they found out, and Flatt and Scruggs sponsor, flour and cornmeal maker Martha White, offered to put the Pine Ridge Boys on the road, too. But with several members of the group having just started families, the band opted to stay put. They also passed on an opportunity to audition for Memphis’ Sun Records.

“I kind of wish we’d done it,” says Sparks of the missed professional opportunities. “But then on the other hand, I wouldn’t give up my kids for anything.”

The Pine Ridge Boys’ television show went off the air in 1959, and the band broke up in the early ’60s after Wells became ill. Sparks continued to play music, eventually forming the gospel country outfit the Sparks Family Singers, which played around the tri-state region for more than three decades.

In 2005, Sparks recruited his nephew Scott Nunley and his wife Lambert into the latest incarnation of the Sparks Family Singers. For Lambert, who inherited her love of music from her grandmother growing up in Iuka, Miss., the group represented a return to music-making.

“I just loved music and think I wanted to please my grandmother more than anything else,” recalls Lambert. “Music was real important to my grandmother. But she had eight children and 57 grandchildren, and none of them played a musical instrument except for me.”

Adept on piano, guitar, fiddle, and vocals, Lambert played for a while in a group called the Good Ole Boys, made up mostly of her father’s friends, including the son of Grand Ole Opry member and former Bill Monroe guitarist Pete Pyle. But Lambert had largely set music aside to focus on her and Nunley’s insurance business when Sparks asked them to join the family band.

Two years later, following the death of Wells, the Pine Ridge Boys reunited and eventually drew Lambert and Nunley into its ranks. Today the Pine Ridge Boys consists of original members Sparks and Buford’s brother Nolan on Dobro along with newer “Boys” Nunley on guitar, Lambert on guitar and fiddle, Curly Ward on guitar, Lynn Grissom on banjo, and Bobby Dennis on bass.

“I joke that they’re the world’s oldest teenagers,” says Lambert of her bandmates, whom she describes as cutups. “Bryan is 80, we have three 70 year-olds, two of whom will be 71 in just a couple of months; two 60-year-olds, and me. And I’m not going to tell you how old I am, or I’d have to kill you.”

In its second incarnation, the Pine Ridge Boys have been almost as busy as they were in their salad days a half century ago. The band has recorded two albums, Gospel Songs From the Mississippi Hills (2008) and Blues Songs From the Mississippi Hills (2009). They also have two more — a gospel and a secular disc, both of which feature vintage recordings from the original Pine Ridge Boys alongside new material from the current lineup — in the works. Lambert says the discs should be ready in the coming weeks and that they may have advance copies at Saturday’s show.

And in a move that harkens back to the Pine Ridge Boys old TV show, the band has been filming a web series called “Music From the Mississippi Hills,” accessible through the band’s Web site, lisalambertmusic.com, that features live performances and interviews.

“The Pine Ridge Boys has been an extremely exciting adventure,” says Lambert. “We’re working on putting our own spin on those old songs that the guys sang years and years ago. And of course we still write new songs, as well. I grew up playing more country blues. So as we blended our sounds together we ended up with what we call ‘hillbilly blues,’ which is grass with a little soul. And that pretty much covers all of Mississippi right there.”

Lisa Lambert & the Pine Ridge Boys

8 p.m. Saturday at the Center For Southern Folklore’s Folklore Store, 123 S. Main. Admission: $5. For more information, call (901) 525-3655 or visit southernfolklore.com.

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