Brandon Lee
photo by Bob Gustin
~ by Bob Gustin
Brandon Lee plays a mean mandolin.
Also guitar, banjo, piano, violin, dobro, bass, flute, pedal steel, harmonica, drums, ukulele and, as he puts it,“ whatever I can find.”
A 26-year-old Brown County native who lives in the Helmsburg area, he has been a member of some of the top area bluegrass bands since he was a teen, and just this year toured with a national country music group playing bars, festivals, and dancehalls.
Brandon also did a solo project based on his real-life experiences, which he calls“ Infamous,” the story of a heartbroken cowboy told as a country and western honkytonk opera. It’ s all original music, told in a series of tales by three cowboys sitting around a campfire at night in the High Sierras, and available to hear free on < soundcloud. com >. On the website, he describes himself as Dusty Heenahan,“ spranged from the hollers of Brown County … a multiinstrumentalist, composer, producer, songwriter, whiskey drinker, gun slinger, forward thinkin’, country singin’ son of a gun.” And he warns that some of the lyrics are“ explicit.”
“ Infamous” was a response to a difficult time in his life. Within a two-week period, his father died and his partner of four years left him and moved to the West Coast. In the stories, a cowboy’ s one true love leaves him and he sets out on a journey through the desert to try to find himself.
“ Every bit of the story is true,” he said.“ It was a way of dealing with what was going on. Just working through it. There are songs written for my father, my mother, friends.”
Music has a healing power, and Brandon uses it.
His grandfather, William Bernard Lee, was a fiddler who has a road named after him at Bill Monroe’ s Music Park in Bean Blossom. His father, William Lee Jr., was also a musician, playing guitar and bass. And his mother, Julia Waltman, has roots in Brown County going back to some of the first settlers in the area. He says his parents encouraged him to explore music.
Maybe that explains why Brandon feels more at home here than in the other places he’ s lived and played.
“ I do not feel as open, as free, or
16 Our Brown County • Nov./ Dec. 2017