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The Bellamy Brothers keep gaining fans, 33 years in

Friday, August 8, 2008

Courtesy photo. Enlarge photo.

Howard, left, and David Bellamy — who often are credited as the duo that gave rise to like acts such as Montgomery Gentry — perform at 8 p.m. Thursday for the Routt County Fair. Tickets are $10 for those ages 13 and older, $5 for children ages 5 to 12, and free for children younger than 5.

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By Margaret Hair (Contact)

The Bellamy Brothers are huge in Europe.

And coming from a generations-old family cattle ranch in Florida, it is unlikely that a young Howard or David Bellamy would have ever seen that coming.

But as the duo’s sound has progressed throughout three decades from the pop hit “Let Your Love Flow” to the bar-napkin scrawled “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body (Would You Hold it Against Me)” to a seemingly endless string of top-10 country rock hits, the brothers spawned a genre they never fully intended to create: tongue-in-cheek songwriting by two guys in cowboy hats.

“Our first record was a pop hit; in 15 countries it was a No. 1 song. So it opened up so many doors. I think the reason David and I sort of leaned back toward our country roots was that at the time disco was so big, and we weren’t really disco fans and it didn’t lean much toward songwriting,” said Howard Bellamy, explaining the duo’s shift back to its cowboy roots after “Let Your Love Flow” made it big in 1976.

“It’s naturally what we do, so we kind of just naturally headed that way,” he said. “If ‘Let Your Love Flow’ had been recorded today, it would have been considered a country song anyway.”

Over the phone on a Tuesday afternoon in Switzerland (a Tuesday morning in Colorado), Howard Bellamy explained that although the land of four languages is expensive, it’s one of his favorite places to play.

“Other than (everything being in) another language, if people like your music, you get into a show and you really forget you’re in another country, except for the jetlag,” he said, noting that after jetting up to Scandinavia for two concerts in Norway, he and David would be on their way back to the United States for a fall season’s worth of the state and county fair circuit, including an appearance Thursday at the Routt County Fair.

Although Howard Bellamy is wary of labeling his duo’s music as anything in particular — “It’s hard to tell one genre from the other now. We never really liked to classify music in the first place,” he said — he is willing to admit that without the songs he and David made popular, the Brooks & Dunns of the world probably wouldn’t exist.

“I think David and me were one of the early reasons that it evolved,” he said.

“It was controversial some of the stuff we were doing at the time in country. … Some people probably didn’t want it to go that way. I think everything evolves. Everything has naturally evolved; your world has evolved,” he said, before drawing a comparison between the development of country rock and the development of a global economy.

“Everything evolves into something it wasn’t. I think it’s just a natural process, and I think to fight that is useless. You might as well just enjoy it. There are great things to be had from all directions, if you keep the integrity of it,” Howard Bellamy said.

The Bellamy Brothers’ appetite for good music of any kind — Howard Bellamy listed classical and bluegrass as some of the styles he listens to — combined with their humble upbringing and lack of any kind of formal or regimented music education, give them the insight to write a song such as “Redneck Girl,” as well as a wide appeal.

“We get as broad a demographic as anyone I know. It’s literally 8 to 80, which I think is the reason we’re still around after 33 years,” Howard Bellamy said.