SHOWTIME

    Armed with ample voices and guitars, the two take on a few serious songs ("Bury Me Beneath the Willow," for instance), but the focus is definitely on humor.  And there are plenty of corn-based chuckles to be had: "Ode to the Little "Burn" Shack" is a topical reworking of Billy Edd Wheeler's "Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back," which addresses the Georgia crematory operator who found it more cost effective to hide bodies than burn them: "...although you say your mother's dead/ I have some space under my bed/ and she could stay there for eternity..."

     Also included are heartfelt renditions of "Drop Kick Me Jesus," "Let's Do Something Cheap and Superficial," "Hemorrhoids" and "The Big One" - that last one is not about a nuclear bomb, only something nearly as powerful. 

     Free laughs can be had at www.walkerandandy.com.

By Wayne Bledsoe,
News-Sentinel music writer

August 2, 2002    

     It's not that Walker Johnson and Andy Morton - better known as the folk music/comedy duo Walker and Andy - need some paying gigs.
     They'd just like a few more gigs outside of Brackins, the bar in downtown Maryville run by Mark and Linda Brackin, who happen to pay rent to Johnson.
     ``I've got to get away from the stigma that because I own the building, I get to play there,'' Johnson joked during a recent interview. ``But I swear, Mark wouldn't have us back and pay us if were weren't any good.''
     Johnson doesn't really mind playing Brackins - in fact, he and Morton performed at the bar's opening night, after the duo pitched their performance to Mark Brackin.
     ``We told him one good thing - that if he needed somebody for free, we'd come and play,'' Johnson said, laughing. ``He liked us, so he actually hired us back. He was pleasantly surprised that the landlord could actually play.''
     Not that the pair's musical talent should be doubted. And the fact its cemented in a lifelong friendship means Walker and Andy play off each other naturally, the way old friends often do, and when they combine their musical talents, the result is an often-funny, always-entertaining stage show.
     Johnson and Morton were born on the same day, in the same year and in the same hospital in Maryville. (Morton is a few hours older.) The two grew up together, singing in church choirs and attending the University of Tennessee, where they played in local groups or performed solo, but they never had the opportunity to play together.
     Johnson developed a folk/comedy style with a guitar performing around Knoxville and Gatlinburg, while Morton switched from guitar to upright bass,

 performing with several bands at everything from fraternity parties to local conventions. After graduation, Johnson began to focus on a radio career, while Morton moved to Memphis to pursue a vocation in architecture.
     In Memphis, Morton stayed active in the music scene, playing part-time with the band Crawdad and forming the group Southbound before joining Briarpatch, a Memphis favorite that toured throughout the mid-South. A hybrid of two of those bands, Crawpatch, snared Morton in 1974, and for the next 15 years, the group performed in and around Memphis.
     In 1982, Johnson revived his music career at the World's Fair, where he performed four nights a week on the outdoor Garden Stage. He went back to radio, however, and in 2001, he ran into Morton at the reunion for the Maryville High School Class of 1966. Morton had left his most recent band, Lost Dog, and moved back to East Tennessee, and the two decided to finally form a group.
``I never went on audition with a guitar where I came away and didn't get paid to play,'' he said. ``We're 54 years old apiece, so that's 108 years of experience!  We decided to see what we could do, and boom! There's money in it. We won't get rich or leave our day jobs, but man it's fun.

We kind of knew up front it was going to work out, but we didn't know it was going to work out this well.''
     Developing a routine came naturally, Johnson added, and evolved from a desire to entertain the audience as well as play music for it.
     ``I've been telling jokes for 35 years on the radio, so it's a pure natural thing for me whether I've got a mic or a guitar,'' he said. ``If I'm in front of a group, I'm going to do stuff and I'm going to entertain. Rather than two guys singing from artistic point of view, we want to entertain everybody. We wanted to be different. A lot of guys can sing, but that's boring.''
     The group has only written one song - ``Ode to the Burn Shack,'' about the controversy surrounding a crematorium operator in north Georgia recently charged with improperly disposing of bodies - and in the meantime they borrow liberally from a number of comedy duos.
     ``We rip off everyone from Pinker and Bowden to Homer and Jethro to unknowns,'' he said. ``Although comedy is an element and glue that holds us together, we're really about really tight harmony and really good music. We do everything from ballads to songs with a driving folk sound.''