The Brothers Four To Showcase Pearson

The Brothers Four concert Saturday night at The Met will be especially meaningful to one particular Brother, Mark Pearson.

“It’s a homecoming show for me,” said Pearson, 50, a 1965 graduate of Lewis and Clark High School and a member of the Brothers Four since 1969.

Pearson even gets a showcase spot in this concert. The first half of the show will feature Pearson alone, singing his own songs. The second half will feature the Seattle-based Brothers Four, turning the clock back to the folk boom of the early ‘60s. The group includes two original members, Bob Flick and John Paine, as well as newer members Terry Lauber and Pearson.

They will sing what Pearson calls “the American songbook.” They’ll do a couple of Broadway tunes (probably “Try to Remember,” which they helped popularize) as well as a number of American folk songs in the Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger tradition, plus medleys of bluegrass tunes and train songs.

And, of course, the hits that the Brothers Four are known for. You might call those the “green” category of songs, since their biggest hits were “Greenfields” in 1960, and “The Green Leaves of Summer,” also in 1960 and from the movie “The Alamo.”

Pearson’s solo set will feature his folk-pop songs, which he writes for the Nashville market. He says his influences have been Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and Joni Mitchell. He likes songs with lyrics that have poetry and meaning. He accompanies himself on guitar, but he might even pick up the four-string banjo to show people his real roots.

“That’s how I got started in Spokane,” said Pearson. “I was 15 years old, and we had a little four-string banjo band. We got a job at a Coeur d’Alene Hotel playing ‘Bye Bye Blues’ and ‘Just Because.’ ‘Tiger Rag’ was our showstopper.”

The young Pearson also had other interests: He was the LC student body president and a high-school All-American lineman on the football team.

But music was his true passion, and he and two other LC students soon began a folk trio called the Castaways.

He went to the University of Washington on a football scholarship, but he eventually dropped football and concentrated on music. He was in an all-acoustic folk group at the university called the Mourning Ryde (hey, it was 1966).

He happened to be in the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, the same UW fraternity that spawned the Brothers Four in 1960. So when the Brothers Four went looking for a new singer in 1969, they auditioned Pearson, who won the job despite the fact that an unknown named John Denver also auditioned.

Pearson has been with the group ever since.

Today, he makes his living as a songwriter and a free-lance writer of greeting cards. He also performs in the Seattle area as a solo act, and he has recorded two albums of his own music. But his main occupation has been as one of the four Brothers, which keeps him surprisingly busy.

Last year, the group played 25 concerts in the United States. They also did a month-long tour of Japan and another month in China.

Saturday’s concert will have a bit of family flavor for Pearson: His parents, Roy and Ruth Pearson of Spokane, are serving as the concert promoters for this particular gig.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: CONCERT The Brothers Four will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at The Met. Tickets are $16 and $12, available at G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.