Oak Ridge Boys’ Joe Bonsall – HuffPost 4.9.14
Mike Ragogna: Joe, what advice do you have for new artists?
Joe Bonsall: Well, I don’t know what advice I can give to artists these days because there seem to be so many. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and my gosh, you can go downtown right now this afternoon and walk down Second Avenue and listen to one new kid after another singing on the street corner or in the bars and they all sound pretty doggone good. You’ve got to do something to make yourself stick out from the other guys. A lot of these guys kind of sound the same. I don’t know, I guess if you’re really, really good and you’re moving people with your music then stay at it and don’t give up your dream because dreams do come true and a lot of hard work and a lot of great talent will pay off for you eventually. But I still think you’ve got to work on trying to be something a little bit different than what people are hearing.
MR: Do you feel like the Oak Ridge Boys did that when you guys were starting?
JB: Definitely! When we came out everybody was saying, “Well there is a group…” and they were talking about The Statler Brothers. Well now, the Oak Ridge Boys and The Statlers, aside from being a four-man singing group, had nothing whatsoever in common. We didn’t sing alike, our songs were different, we didn’t sound the same. But the thing is, yes, when “Y’all Come Back Saloon” hit the airwaves you can talk to people all over the place and they will say, “My gosh, when ‘Saloon’ hit, there was nothing like that on the radio.” The Oak Ridge Boys had a whole new niche happening right there. That gospel harmony, that fullness of singing, that quality of sound and a song like that, it revolutionized a whole lot of things and it certainly revolutionized our career because we did manage to come out and sound like everybody else. We had a new thing. Nobody had quite what we had–a bunch of cool young guys, dressing cool, singing cool, being cool–and it worked for us back then and it obviously continued to work for us. I think we put something new on the table, I think we really did.