The Bellamy Brothers are one of a very few country music acts that can claim longevity. David and Howard Bellamy have spent half a century making music that has traveled everywhere from the radio stations of rural America to the concert halls of East Germany in the days just after the Berlin Wall came down. With a landmark anniversary album on the way and a headline show at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium coming up later this month, the brothers are celebrating their golden jubilee.
The Bellamy Brothers' story begins, as so many great ones do, with a song that arrived and simply took over. "Let Your Love Flow," released in 1976, became one of the defining hits of its era. It connected with audiences far beyond anything the brothers could have predicted at the time.
"When we first heard the song, we always really, really liked it and recognized right away this is something we could do," David Bellamy says. "It would have been hard at that point to realize how big it would become."
And how big did it become? Worldwide. A genuine global hit that put the Bellamy Brothers on stages in over seventy countries and set the foundation for the next 50 years.
David Bellamy had already been in the music business long enough to know what a good song felt like. He wrote "Spiders and Snakes" for Jim Stafford before his own recording career took off. "We had a taste of success in the music business," he says, "but we had no idea that it was going to be a worldwide hit."
To mark the anniversary, the Bellamy Brothers went into the studio with the intention of putting together a modest retrospective. But something else happened instead. "We started out with maybe trying to put an album together that contained a few hits and a few new songs and a few older songs," David says, "but then we kept coming up with some new tracks and it ended up being an all new original album."
With six albums already in the catalog from their most prolific years, adding another greatest hits package didn't hold much appeal. But a brand new collection of original material did. "We thought a nice new fresh original album would be nice," he says. "Most of it's just stuff we wrote."
Leading the way into the anniversary is a new single, simply titled "50 Years On." It's a song David describes as less a grand statement and more a collection of honest memories. "It's just more or less bullet points," he says. "All the stuff in that song is actually true and that all did happen." The lyrics mention things like losing friends, running with Haggard, hanging with Jones and playing for The Rolling Stones. He acknowledges that a complete account of five decades in music would have required considerably more time. "It would have been three hours long if we had mentioned everything."
This month brings one of the more personally meaningful milestones of the brothers' anniversary year: a headline show at the Ryman Auditorium.
"We played at the Ryman when they did the Tuesday night operas and stuff," David says. "We would go and do a song with a little of a toasting night or whatever. But we've never done a show there, so it's going to be really special to do that. I can't wait. Now that Nashville is such a destination city, you know?"
Ask David Bellamy about their early touring history and he has many stories. Performing in the former East Germany shortly after the Berlin Wall fell. Touring India. Playing Sri Lanka. Watching Russian soldiers who had been walking past a venue stop, turn around, and stay for the show."We've seen some interesting things," he says. Over seventy countries and a career that has taken them to places most artists never reach. "We've been a few places," David says. "People are people everywhere. If somebody likes music, they like music."
So what has brought The Bellamy Brothers their staying power? "I guess the stubbornness," he says. "We've been thrown off of record labels. Really the only adversary we've had have been labels we've had over the years. That's the only thing. Those have probably been our biggest fights over the years, but that's all behind us now."
After five decades, the thing that started it all, the love of writing songs, remains strong. David Bellamy writes on airplanes when he's bored. He and Howard have a studio where they trade ideas back and forth, leaving tracks for each other, calling to say "go listen to that."
"Songwriting is just something that's one of our first loves," he says, "and so it's not really a job." What inspires it? Almost anything, he says. "Sometimes it'll be a big event and sometimes it's just the smallest of things. You never quite know what it will be."
The new single came naturally, he says, because the material was already lived. "I felt compelled to write something for the 50th anniversary. It wasn't laborious or anything. It came pretty easy because I knew all the facts. It was just a matter of connecting it."
Fifty years in. A new album. A Ryman debut. And a songwriter who still pulls out his iPad on a plane just to see what comes. The Bellamy Brothers keep journeying forward. BellamyBrothers.com
"People are people everywhere. If somebody likes music, they like music."
"We've seen some interesting things."