Guitar wiz Junior Brown can pick a style, any style

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The great American band leader John Philip Sousa had a special instrument built when he couldn’t get the sound he wanted from a helicon, which is a cousin of the tuba. That’s how we got the sousaphone.Junior Brown pulled a Sousa when he decided to invent his own instrument – the guit-steel. It’s a custom-made, double-necked stringed instrument that’s part electric guitar and part lap-steel guitar. No else has one.

“After the first few times I played it, it started becoming my identity,” Brown said. “I guess it’s kind of nice to have one thing you’re always identified with.”

That also makes him the world’s only master player of the guit-steel and, lordy, Brown sure can pick. He’s fluent in a number of styles – Texas swing, surf music, rockabilly, honky-tonk, traditional country and even Hawaiian guitar. (Or is it Hawaiian guit-steel?) See how many he rips through when Brown visits today for a show at the Beta Bar.

“I like playin’ the field. I’m kind of all over the place, and that’s the way I like it,” Brown, 55, said on his cell phone last week as he drove from Oklahoma to Marble Falls, Texas, for a concert on the shores of Lake Travis.

Brown, the son of a music professor, developed eclectic tastes young as he was growing up in Indiana and later in Arizona. During his teens and early 20s, Brown played the honky-tonk circuit with cover bands around the Southwest. When he settled down in Austin, Texas, in the late ’70s, Brown found his musical home playing with such Longhorn State legends as Flaco Jimenez, Asleep at the Wheel and “Uncle” Walter Hyatt (who died in a plane crash in 1996).

“Walter was good friend of mine,” Brown said. “All the musicians in Austin – which was a little college town when I moved there – wanted to play with Walter. Austin’s not such a little college town now.”

The early ’80s proved to be a rough time for Brown. No one was much interested in a tall fellow wearing cowboy hat who liked to play traditional tunes by Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills.

At the invitation of Texas Playboy pedal-steel player Leon McAuliffe, Brown moved to Oklahoma to teach guitar at the Hank Thompson School of Country Music at Rogers State University. That’s where he met and married his wife in 1988.

In the ’90s, Brown’s fortunes changed when he started writing clever, catchy, country-inspired songs. They include the self-explanatory “My Baby Don’t Dance to Nothing But Ernest Tubb,” an ode to a hard-partying wife in “Gotta Get Up Every Morning (Just To Say Goodnight To You)” and the award-winning “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead,” about bumping into a former flame.

“I usually come up with the title first and then just write a story around it,” Brown said. “I try to keep it simple and not make it too complex. Sometimes it’s harder to be simple. You also can’t force it. If you’re trying too hard in anything it’s going to show.”

The success of his albums led to acting gigs on shows such as “The X-Files” and as the baritone-voiced narrator for the Hollywood remake of “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Brown had nice things to say about “The X-Files” experience but is not a fan of the final cut of “Dukes of Hazzard” – which he feels was gratuitously “trash-mouthed” for a film essentially aimed at kids.

“You don’t have to make it sterile, but you don’t have to make it trashy,” Brown said. “I went to watch the movie and just cringed. I was sorry to have my name on it. I don’t take part in stuff that doesn’t have a good message. And it didn’t make much of a message.”