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Brownie McGheeBorn With The Blues

Rare Performances 1966-1992

Despite childhood warnings against the ruinous ‘Devil’smusic’ from a pious aunt, blues proved to be a refreshingtonic to Walter Brown McGhee; the music offered acreative outlet that let him slake his thirst for fresh facesand places. “I’m seeing the world,” he told Barry Elmes(Living Blues, #13, Summer 1973), “meeting new faces,forming new friendships, and making a living. It keepsme young. You stay in one place too long, you feel yourown self sinkin’ down.” That would never suit Brownie.More than 2,000 air miles separate Knoxville, Tennessee,where he was born November 30, 1915, from Oakland,California, where he died February 16, 1996. Brownie’strajectory from the one point to the other was anythingbut ‘as the crow flies’ straight following a period ofyouthful rambling through Tennessee and the Carolinas(“Six years of hitchhikin’,” he told Elmes), there wereover 20 years as an important adjunct to both folk andrhythm & blues scenes in New York City and countlessnational and international tours in the company of SonnyTerry.

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Despite all that, the myriad experiences which trailed inthe wake of McGhee’s departing the Piedmont countrycirca 1942 did not essentially change a music rooted,he would vigorously assert, in sounds he heard from hisfather in the 1920s. “From my daddy I got most of myear for the sound of the guitar, which was very importantto me,” McGhee told Happy Traum (Guitar Styles ofBrownie McGhee, Oak Publications, New York, 1971).“When he played it, basically I tried to reproduce hissound.”

In time George Duffield McGhee’s sound becamehis son’s, and that legacy would see Browniesuccessfully through a life in which he became a widelyinfluential musician and one able to enjoy some middle-class creature comforts (he proudly dubbed his Oaklanddomicile “The House That Blues Built”). He wouldappear on Broadway (Cat On a Hot Tin Roof), in films(Angel Heart) and on television (Family Ties). TheMartin D-18 Brownie played from the late-1950s untilits 1975 theft was a gift from actor Andy Griffith, withwhom he appeared in the film A Face in the Crowd(Brownie later picked in an episode of Griffith’s TV seriesMatlock and even accompanied Griffith on an album).In the 1950s and 1960s, his partnership with SonnyTerry introduced legions of folk music fans to countryblues, though some members of that audience wouldbecome hard-core blues buffs and eventually disparagethe duo as somehow inauthentic. Ironically, the team’sdecades of experience performing before urban whiteaudiences, viewed alongside the rawer blues re-discoveries of the 1960s, were often held against it. Butwithout the McGhee-Terry team as ‘advance men,’ wouldthe folk audience have ever developed an appetite forthe unpolished pleasures of Son House or Bukka White?Their besetting sin was simply long-standing familiarityand the contempt it breeds.

Happily, Brownie lived to see his music and itsinfluence newly appreciated after a season of neglect.Such are the victories of survivors. December 21, 1994was the shortest day of the year, but it offered a longand memorable night to Brownie McGhee and his family

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at Yoshi’s Nitespot in his hometown of Oakland.“Brownie is a good friend of mine and I wanted to dosomething special for his birthday,” said the club’sbooking agent Michael James. The 80th birthday bashwas both late and early: three weeks late for Brownie’sNovember 30th birthday and a year ahead of themilestone it celebrated. But Brownie may have felt hewas 80: he had long believed he was born in 1914 untila 1958 tour abroad required a passport and a searchfor birth records turned up the birth year 1915.

“Yoshi’s Nitespot Presents An 80th Birthday Tributeto Legendary Blues Man, Singer, Guitarist, Songwriter,Entertainer, Actor and Philosopher of the Blues BrownieMcGhee,” proclaimed a December 8, 1994 pressrelease. The more than 20 performers at the tributedonated their talents to Brownie’s Blues Is TruthFoundation. Michael James said, “Brownie told meabout his dream of turning his home into an historicalmonument for his family and fans to enjoy. He doesn’tlike the word museum; it makes it feel like a relic. Heprefers ‘shrine’ or ‘monument.’” The fundraiser was alsoa rare occasion to see McGhee, who had been inactivefor the better part of a decade. Bay Area music scribeLee Hildebrand wrote: “In 1986, on his way home toOakland following a tour of Australia, Brownie McGheestopped off in Hawaii. There he resolved to give upsmoking and drinking. The Tennessee-born blues singeralso made up his mind to stop performing, thus endinga career that spanned a half century... McGhee is amongthe most gifted and prolific of blues poets. His songs,capturing moods from the bitter to the jovial, have well-developed storylines and are filled with philosophicalinsight. Most have strong melodies, and many vary fromthe standard twelve-bar blues form. Such a rich anddiverse catalog provided the nearly two dozen soloists,duos, and groups participating in the birthday tributewith ample musical fodder for the occasion. Over thecourse of almost five hours, most of the invited artiststook turns delivering tunes from the McGhee songbook.”Those artists included Chris Cain, Bob Brozman, BarbaraDane, Roy Rogers and Norton Buffalo. The guest of

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honor closed the show, and Hildebrand wrote: “Brownie’spicking was barely audible, nor was it as flashy as muchof what had been heard earlier that night. Yet throughthe warmth of his resonant low-tenor tones, the vitalityof his facial expressions, and especially the way in whichhe brought urgency to key words in his clearlyenunciated lyrics, it became immediately clear to thosestill in the room that they were in the presence of atowering talent, the likes of which don’t pass this waytoo often.”

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Brownie would make at least one more significantpublic appearance, at the 1995 Chicago Blues Festival.Celebrating the natal year of a bumper crop of significantbluesmen, the Festival’s theme was ‘The Class of ‘15.’(MCA’s The Class of ‘15, CHD3P-3373, offers a coupleof Brownie & Sonny performances along with MemphisSlim, Muddy Waters, and Willie Dixon, late legends alsoborn in 1915.) David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards and RobertJr. Lockwood were the other surviving octogenarianalumni who performed at the Chicago Festival. In anoverview of Brownie’s career (“A Wholesale Dealin’ Papa–Brownie McGhee at 80,” Blues & Rhythm # 105,December 1995), Chris Smith wrote: “While Lockwoodand Edwards get their full share of attention from theblues media, Brownie McGhee is often overlooked, andsometimes slighted when he is noticed.” That wasbeginning to change, as the sometimes acrimonious lastdays of the McGhee-Terry duo began to fade frommemory and fresh evidence of Brownie’s stature in blueshistory was offered. The most striking evidence was the1994 reissue of The Complete Brownie McGhee(Columbia/Legacy C2K 52933), a 47-track collectionof McGhee’s 1940-41 recordings for OKeh. In rating adouble-CD reissue, McGhee joined the exclusivecompany of Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson inLawrence Cohn’s ‘Roots N’ Blues’ series. Even withouthis subsequent career before folk audiences or his less-heralded successes in rhythm & blues, Brownie’s pre-War recordings would assure him a place of prominencein the blues pantheon. But that was merely one chapterin his story, and the last 14 months of his life witnesseda renewed appreciation of the scope of his artistry andinfluence. Along with the birthday bash at Yoshi’s and‘Class of ‘15’ appearance in Chicago, Smith’s Blues &Rhythm article and Cathy Signorelli’s loving feature inthe Nov.-Dec. ‘95/Jan. ‘96 Sing Out! pointed to a newawareness of Brownie McGhee. When cancer claimedhim on February 16, 1996, he surely knew that he hadnot been forgotten.

Further assurance of that came nine months afterBrownie’s death. Joseph Jordan reported, “On Tuesday

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evening, Nov-ember 19th, theOakland CityCouncil, presidedover by MayorElihu Harris, un-animously passedits decision thatBrownie McGhee’slongtime resid-ence, ‘The HouseThat Blues Built,’be forevermoredesignated withlandmark status.Brownie’s familyand Oakland homewil l be given aplaque signifyingthis status and thehouse will stand‘as is’ (at least on

the outside, except for necessary repairs) from now on.”Thus, official and permanent validation of Brownie’sbelief in blues as something enduring, even respectablerather than an object of scorn. His motto: “Blues IsTruth.”

Truth, of course, isn’t always a simple equation inthe lives of public figures. Memories are selective andeven something as straightforward as a birthdate canbecome controversial. For example, in her Sing Out!profile, Signorelli wrote: “Though he’s celebrated Nov.30, 1915 as his birth date for many years, Walter BrownMcGhee was actually born on Nov. 23 in Knoxville,Tennessee. (His real date of birth had burned with thefamily Bible many years ago, and he only recentlylearned the truth.)” A small but bothersome detail forbiographers: what was the source of Brownie’srevelation? Signorelli doesn’t say.

Other controversies are discographical. McGhee’sfirst recording session as leader was in August 1940,

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more than a year prior to his first official recordings withTerry. But thanks to discographical sleuthing, it appearshe sang one song at Blind Boy Fuller’s last session (andTerry was among the accompanists). Chris Smith toldthe tale in his Blues & Rhythm career overview:“‘Precious Lord’ by Brother George and His SanctifiedSingers is said to have been recorded on 19 June 1940at a Blind Boy Fuller session, and the personnel is givenby (discographers) Dixon & Godrich as Fuller, guitar,Sonny Terry, harmonica, and Bull City Red, vocal/washboard. Bruce Bastin pointed out the presence of asecond harmonica, aurally Jordan Webb, in Red RiverBlues (University of Illinois Press, 1986), but thereseemed to be another problem, in that the singer’sdignified, clearly articulated, rather stiff baritone soundsnothing like Bull City Red. Then it dawned on me: ifJordan Webb, who was Brownie McGhee’s harp playerat the time, was present at the session, it seems logicalthat McGhee should have been, too. (A&R man) J.B.Long, having just begun to manage McGhee and Webb,would have wanted OKeh to audition them, the moreso, perhaps, since Fuller was very ill by this time... Guidovan Rijn, who had research questions of his own to askBrownie, kindly offered to make enquiries on my behalf.I quote from Guido’s letter to me: ‘I asked if he everrecorded with Blind Boy Fuller. No, he had never beenin the same studio with Fuller. I next played him ‘PreciousLord’ and he was amazed. It was definitely Fuller onguitar and McGhee himself singing. Brownie laughedloudly: this was really impossible, someone had doctoredtwo recordings!” Brownie’s denial contradicts what hetold Living Blues interviewer Barry Elmes in 1972: “Iwas only in the studio one time (with Blind Boy Fuller)and I think we did a record together under BrotherGeorge and His Sanctified Singers. Yeah, and I was oneof them, Sonny was one of ‘em, Jordan was one of ‘em,and Fuller was one of ‘em! And we played a spiritualsong.”

Further confusion: “I met Sonny after Fuller died,”McGhee told Tim Schuller in 1973 (“‘Til I Find My WayBack Home: The Lost Brownie McGhee Interview,” Blues

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Access, Summer ‘96), a memory flatly contradicted bythe previous recording session anecdote. (For his part,Sonny told Barry Elmes: “I run into Brownie in 1939, ina little place called Burlington, North Carolina. I wasstill with Blind Boy. Me and Blind Boy Fuller met him atthe same time.”) Accuracy will probably always eludeMcGhee’s biographers on certain points, though thegeneral outline of his life emerges clearly in hisautobiographical songs. That, of course, is reallyenough, though for biography the hastily-written butcolorful one Brownie’s agent offered the press in 1959holds a quaint charm today:

“Christened Walter Brown McGhee, Brownie wasborn November 30, 1914 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Hehad two sisters and a brother as well as some half-sistersand half-brothers. At the age of four he had polio andhe remembers that all right, because ever since thenone leg has been shorter than the other.

“He played piano, beginning that some time afterhe first strummed the strings of his father’s guitar, atthe age of eight or thereabouts. As a youngster in Venore,where he went to grade school, there was an unpainted,slab-sided church, the Solomon Temple Baptist, wherehe sometimes played an old fashioned, foot-pumpingorgan. When no one was around he played blues on it.(As is well known, the Negro Baptists separate sharply

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between sacred and secular songs.) He also sometimesplayed guitar and piano for the Sanctified Church, whichgave more of a jump beat to its hymns.

“Brownie got to know many white hillbilly and folksingers, as well as Negroes. Among the blues singerswho have been his friends and of whose influence he isproud, one notes that, while many of them are trulyamong the great blues singers, three are renownedguitarists – Blind Boy Fuller, Lead Belly (HuddieLedbetter), and Lonnie Johnson, the latter one of thepioneer links between folk blues and jazz. And of coursethere was Blind Sonny Terry whose harmonica talks,has talked often to Brownie’s guitar, and the guitar hastalked right back...

“In grade school days, when most of us werechanging our voices and getting an unmusical croak inthe bargain, Brownie had it both ways –a flexible voiceenabled him to sing base (sic) parts and lead! He didthis in one of several vocal groups that he eitherorganized or helped to get together. One he organizedwas called The Golden Voices. They sang for churches,social gatherings, and the like, in Tennessee and nearbyWest Virginia. They knew spirituals, hillbilly ballads, folksongs, blue and popular standards such as ‘Let Me CallYou Sweetheart.’

“When he was out of knee pants but couldn’t proveit, he was kicked out of traveling shows, taken in byothers such as one run by an improbable charactercalled ‘jailhouse’ who danced on roller skates. TheMighty Hagg Carnival had a colored Minstrel Showattached to it and in the latter Brownie played somepiano, guitar, and sang.

“In Kingsport, Tennessee outside which his unclehad the farm, Brownie got in some high school and moreand more outside jobs, not merely summer jobs. Thispart of the state is historical country. Daniel Boone cutthrough here and Jackson took the route when it wasalmost equally rough going.

“In the course of his young days in Tennessee andthereabouts, Brownie sang in cellar places called ‘hole-in-the-wall taverns,’ in ‘jook joints’ the early road houses

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that were bush league sporting houses and in the bighouses that looked like mansions ‘but there were alwaystwo or more ways to get in – or out.’ Of these, he said,‘Each place had a different type of music but they allseemed to like blues. There were no amplifiers in thosedays and people listened to what you were singing.’

“Brownie holds very successful sessions in his housein Brooklyn. No electric guitars are allowed in, but allsorts of blues players take part.”

Thus said Brownie’s 1959 press bio. Given thelingering McCarthy-era pall of the time, it’s under-standable that no mention is made of Brownie’sassociation with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and othersdubbed ‘Marxist minstrels’ by the era’s Red-baiters. TheAlmanac Singers’ Millard Lampell had instigated theMcGhee-Terry team’s move to New York City, where theylived for awhile at the communal Almanac House beforeencamping at more comfortable digs with Leadbelly.Brownie and Sonny often performed with Woody Guthrie,an activist who believed in practicing what he preached.Brownie told Signorelli: “One time in the 1940s weplayed a Union party in Baltimore with Woody Guthrie.At the end of the night, the people invited Woody tocome and sit with them and have something to eat. Meand Sonny were welcome to sit in the corner, but wewere not invited to sit at the table with Woody. Woody

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went crazy. He started hollering, ‘Didn’t you see mestanding up there between those two guys all night longsinging ‘Union Forever’? You mean to tell me that theycan’t sit at this table with us? They gotta eat like twodogs in the corner? You want to talk about fascism?The fight against fascism starts right here.’ With that hestarted whipping tables over and throwing food. Therewere bottles breaking and glass flying. Me and Sonnywere terrified. Sonny couldn’t see and I couldn’t run.We just held on until the storm was over. That wasWoody. He typed up ‘This Land Is Your Land’ on mytypewriter. Those were the days when we all held handsand tried to go up.”

Brownie’s striving was evident in his dedication toself-improvement and education. J.B. Long, who steereda number of Piedmont blues and hillbilly acts torecording careers, remembered him as “the smartestman I ever handled.” Brownie called his 1936 highschool diploma “my masterpiece,” and recalled withpride being the class salutatorian who coined this classmotto: Try, Trust and Triumph. Brownie’s musicaltriumphs included his Piedmont blues recordings as‘Blind Boy Fuller No. 2’ and successful waxings formyriad New York rhythm & blues labels: his Savoy labelrelease, “My Fault,” went to the number two spot onBillboard’s Most-Played Juke Box Race Records chartin the fall of 1948. “My name got back in circulation,”Brownie told Happy Traum of his success with “MyFault,” “but some of the people in the South (who hadbought his pre-War 78s) didn’t realize I was still alive.So I began to get some fan mail from down South,‘Brownie, make some more blues with washboard!’”

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a time whenBrownie diversified in order to survive. He played electricguitar in a rhythm & blues quartet, the Mighty HouseRockers, and acoustic ‘folk blues’ with Sonny Terry. Hestarted his ‘Home of the Blues’ enterprise, offeringinstruction in blues songwriting and guitar (Rev. GaryDavis sometimes taught there). By the mid-1950s, ther&b idiom Brownie worked best was waning and the‘urban folk boom’ was about to erupt, an event which

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embraced Brownie andSonny and kept theman active touring duolong past the time theyenjoyed one another’scompany. (Like muchelse, the longevity ofthe team is in dispute.By some accounts, theysplit in the late 1970sChris Smith’s author-itative Blues & Rhythmpiece on McGhee offers1982 as the year of thesplit, but the CharlesWolfe-Kip Lornell book,The Life and Legend ofLeadbelly, has Brownieand Sonny performing

at a fall 1984 Shreveport area tribute to Leadbelly.) Inall probability Brownie felt confined by the team andoffered Sonny’s unwillingness to work with a band orlearn new material as the reason he finally split with hislongtime partner. “Daddy didn’t think me and Sonnywould ever work out,” Brownie mused, and after a 40year run, George McGhee’s hunch finally rang true. Solo or with Sonny, Brownie was a captivatingperformer who combined intensity and urbanity in amanner which was accessible without ever beinginauthentic. The sti l l-vital proof is plain in theperformances collected here.

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The Performances

The five black and white solo performances wererecorded by the Seattle Folk Society in 1966. “KansasCity Blues” was a hit in Brownie’s boyhood. Medicineshow entertainer Jim Jackson reputedly enjoyed amillion seller with his original 1927 Vocalion recording(reissued on Blues Classics, MCAD3-1141). Of hisaccompaniment, Brownie said in Guitar Styles ofBrownie McGhee: “That’s the first rhythm I ever learnedthat I could sing to.” It was the song Brownie sang atthe first major public performance of the McGhee-Terryduo, a May 1942 Washington, D.C. concert which alsofeatured Paul Robeson. “I studied about Paul Robesonin school,” Brownie told Happy Traum, “and being onstage with him was such a gas.”

Brownie told Barry Elmes that “Me and My Dog”was “the first poem I’d ever written that was publishedthrough a song.” It was recorded August 6, 1940 andissued in December as the ‘B’ side of Blind Boy Fuller’s“Bus Rider Blues.” (Brownie’s first release, “Picking MyTomatoes,” had appeared in September with Fuller’s“Night Rambling Woman.”) Writing in the notes to theColumbia/Legacy reissue, Pete Lowry writes: “Eventhough McGhee’s style is different from that of Fuller,the couplings appear to have been an attempt to link

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the two men in the minds of the record purchaser inorder to keep the J.B. Long-supplied record-sellingmachine going.” Brownie recalled making his firstrecordings with an S.S. Stewart archtop f-hole guitar,“which you don’t get nowadays.” (The Philadelphia-based Stewart company is best remembered for itsornate banjos.)

“I’m Going to Tell God How You Treat Me” suggeststhe influence, both vocally and instrumentally, ofBrownie’s sanctified friend (and fellow Piedmontexpatriate) Rev. Gary Davis. The song is a traditionalone that Jaybird Coleman and Ollis Martin made into astunning harmonica duet on their 1927 recording, “I’mGoing to Cross the River of Jordan Some o’ These Days.”In 1961, Brownie and Sonny recorded it as “Some ofThese Days” at a 1961 ‘spirituals’ session issued byFantasy.

Despite his claims of inspiration via experience,“Pawn Shop Blues” is McGhee’s version of Blind BoyFuller’s “Three Ball Blues,” a 1940 recording on whichSonny Terry played harmonica (reissued on ColumbiaCK 46217, Blues & The News–Telling It Like It Is).Perhaps stung by the keen curiosity col lector-interviewers exhibited for the early ‘Blind Boy Fuller No.2’ phase of his career, McGhee tended to downplayFuller’s influence: “I never saw Fuller do anythingextraordinary that I felt I wanted to sit down and reallydo,” he told Mark Greenberg (“Brownie McGhee: BluesLegend Who Won’t Quit,” Frets, July 1982). But his“Pawn Shop Blues,” rife with Fuller-style vocal andinstrumental trademarks, suggests otherwise. (Browniefirst recorded this for Disc in 1947.) Another significantinfluence comes across loud and clear during the single-string solo Brownie plays: Lonnie Johnson. “Basicallyhe’s the only man I believe could ever play the guitar,”Brownie told Greenberg. “I’ve never heard anybody whocould play a guitar like Lonnie Johnson. Modern guitarplayers? I like them all. But I don’t hear anything they’redoing that Lonnie didn’t do.”

“I Was Born With the Blues” is very much McGhee’sown song, one he first recorded for Savoy in 1958. It’s a

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brilliant signature piece which shows Brownie’s knackfor weaving subtle elements of pop song craft into hisblues. “I don’t want to destroy the form,” he told HappyTraum. “I get new content every day, so it’s not hard forme to create a song. That’s discussed by a lot of people,form and content. If I wanted to destroy my form, then Iwould be out on a sea of nothing. I wouldn’t have nothingto play. Everytime I’d hear something, I’d want to get itto sound like the blues.”

“Life Is a Gamble” is the first of three Brownie andSonny performances recorded in 1970 for the KCETprogram, “One of a Kind.” It’s another McGhee original,this with a more ironic tone. “Automobile Blues” is adouble-entendre relative of Robert Johnson’s “Terra-plane Blues,” Smokey Hogg’s “Little Car Blues,” AmosMilburn’s “Hard Driving Blues,” and other slyly salaciousblues of that ilk. Brownie first recorded it as “AutoMechanic Blues” for Savoy in 1947.

“My Father’s Words” is tribute to the paternal wisdomof George Duffield McGhee, a man Brownie recalled as“the black sheep of the family because he played theblues, he drank booze and he hoboed.” But he also gavehis son an invaluable gift of music and self-respect.“Daddy didn’t treat me any different than the others,just because I was crippled,” McGhee told Signorelli.“He taught me that I was a chosen one and that I neededto bear my burden.”

Three 1974 BBC In Concert performances open withMcGhee’s lyrically interesting “Conversation With aRiver,” the sole ‘folk-blues’ in this segment. The othertwo songs offer rare glimpses of Brownie’s r&b sound.“I Feel So Good” is essentially a jump blues of the sortpopular in the 1940s. Brownie McGhee and His JookBlock Busters waxed it for the Jax label in 1952.“Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” was a national r&b hitin 1949 for Brownie’s younger brother, Granville ‘Stick’McGhee. In his authoritative study, Red River Blues: TheBlues Tradition in the Southeast, Bruce Bastin writes:“With the advent of war, Stick found himself in boot campin St. Petersburg, where he wrote a song popular amonghis draftee friends with the refrain, ‘Drinkin’ wine,

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motherfucker, drinkin’ wine, pass the bottle to me,’which was to become his passport to minor success laterin New York...In 1946 Stick and Brownie worked on theboot camp song, altering the lyrics to make themnonsensical...” First recorded for the Harlem label in1947, it was the 1949 revision of “Drinkin’ Wine...” (withBrownie on guitar) which gave ‘Stick’ McGhee (thusnicknamed because in childhood, Brownie said, “hecarried the stick that pushed my go cart”) his one bighit, a ‘barracks ballad’ which proved a turning point forthe then-fledgling Atlantic label. “Selling over 300,00discs,” writes Bastin, “it was Atlantic’s first rhythm &blues hit and set the future direction for the company.”(Stick McGhee died in 1961.)

The final three performances were recorded by JanLe Man in 1992 for a documentary in which British folksinger-guitarist Bert Jansch encountered some of hisseminal influences. (Speaking of those influences in1979, Jansch remarked: “I never did quite get into theblues side of things, apart from playing the BrownieMcGhee sorts of numbers.”) At 77, McGhee was still asupremely commanding per former. “Key to theHighway” is a song associated with the first blues singer-guitarist to make an in-person impact on Europeans,Big Bill Broonzy. But the song’s tune is a variant of “RedRiver Blues,” which Brownie learned from his father.Singer-harmonica player Bill ‘Jazz’ Gillum was the firstto record “Key to the Highway” on May 9, 1940. Big Billfollowed a year later (his “Key to the Highway” wasrecorded May 2, 1941), and as ‘Blind Boy Fuller No. 2,’McGhee recorded “Key to the Highway 70” on May 24,1941 (reissued on Columbia/Legacy’s The CompleteBrownie McGhee). The instrument he played was BlindBoy Fuller’s National Duolian. “It had been in the pawnshop,” McGhee told Tim Schuller. “It was put there byFuller’s brother, and J.B. Long got it out of the pawnshop and give it to me...” McGhee remembered it as a“good, loud outdoor guitar,” but the lyrics to “Pawn ShopBlues” came to life in a financial pinch when ‘Blind BoyFuller No. 2’ pawned his namesake’s legacy in New YorkCity. “A few days later he tried to redeem it but by then

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it was gone,” writes Lawrence Cohn, “never to berecovered.”

“Come On Keep It Coming” is a jaunty ragtime pieceMcGhee likely heard in his youth. It sounds not unlikeBo Carter’s “Twist It Babe.” The final performance is ofa song that Brownie had written 51 years earlier at thebehest of J.B. Long, who had overseen Blind Boy Fuller’srecording career since 1935 and groomed McGhee tofill his shoes when Fuller died on February 13, 1941.Though McGhee’s recollection might lead one to believehis “Death of Blind Boy Fuller” was waxed within daysof Fuller’s death, more than three months elapsed beforethe tribute was recorded on May 23, 1941 (both theissued version and an alternate take appear onColumbia/Legacy’s The Complete Brownie McGhee).Such tributes weren’t unknown (Amos Easton, AKABumble Bee Slim, became Leroy Carr’s Buddy for his1935 homage, “The Death of Leroy Carr”), but theunique circumstance of McGhee’s recording isfascinating, since he was paying tribute to a man whosepassing led McGhee to become his surrogate to record,an oppor tunity which teamed him with Fuller’sharmonica player, Sonny Terry. Recording “Death ofBlind Boy Fuller” with its subject’s unpawned National,the 25-year-old McGhee may have smiled as he pickedthe strings and recalled Fuller’s blunt appraisal of histalent: “Man, you can sing, but you can’t play the guitar.”To the survivor go the spoils, and Brownie McGhee wasone remarkable survivor.

– Mark Humphrey

For invaluable help with background material,many thanks to Mary Katherine Aldin.

Running Time: 60 minutes • B/W & ColorFront cover photo by David GahrNationally distributed byRounder Records,One Camp Street,Cambridge, MA 02140Representation to Music Stores byMel Bay Publications© ® 1997 Vestapol ProductionsA division of Stefan Grossman'sGuitar Workshop Inc.

VESTAPOL 13060

Tunes include: Kansas City Blues,Me And My Dog, I'm Gonna TellGod How You Treat Me, PawnShop Blues, Born & Living WithThe Blues, Life Is A Gamble,Automobile Blues, My Father'sWords, Conversation With ARiver, I Feel So Good,Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,Key To The Highway, Come OnKeep It Coming & Death OfBlind Boy Fuller.

Walter Brown McGhee (1915-1996) was an art iculatespokesman for the blues who,in partnership with SonnyTerry, proselytized the buoy-ant Piedmont-blues-style tofolk audiences a decade before most ever heard of the MississippiDelta. Though he is largely associated with the “folk boom”which made Sonny & Brownie familiar names worldwide,Brownie’s recording career began in Chicago in 1940; thesecond song in this retrospective, Me and My Dog, was Brownie’sfirst issued recording. Other reminders here of Brownie’s pre-War blues career are Death of Blind Boy Fuller (written to orderon the occasion of Fuller's 1941 demise) and the Fuller-influencedPawn Shop Blues.

Tennessee born, Carolina-influenced, New York based inhis “folk boom” glory and a Californian at the time of his death,Brownie showed a wide stylistic range from turn-of-the-centuryragtime (Come On Keep It Coming) to the lyrical sophisticationof such original songs as Conversation With A River. His flair forthe dramatic aside and autobiographical insight augmentpassionate vocals and splendid guitar work in 14 performances,a moving retrospective of an artist too-long taken for granted.Sonny Terry accompanies Brownie on six songs.

ISBN: 1-57940-973-3

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