Category: 1960’s Blues

Show Notes:

Today is the final show devoted to Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee who forged a decades long partnership in the early 40s, cutting numerous recordings together as well as recording independently. Back in 2011 I did air a show that spotlighted the music the duo recorded shortly after they arrived in New York and the artists they worked with such as Champion Jack Dupree, Bobby Harris, Bobby Gaddy and others. I’ve decided to end the shows at 1960, when the duo became firmly entrenched in the folk blues style and the records became a bit predictable and less exciting. That’s not to say they didn’t make good records after this period, they certainly did, but it becomes a pursuit of diminishing gains.

The end of our third show took us up to 1952. As I put those two shows to bed, I finally located my copy of the discography, That’s The Stuff: The Recordings of Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Sticks McGee and J.C. Burris by Chris Smith. Today’s notes come from Chris’s book which includes an excellent overview of the duo’s career. As Chris writes, the duo was “in varying degrees at different times – a creative partnership, but it was also a marketing device, a means to obtain work from (mostly) white audiences who were keen on the idea of musical soulmates, often seeing the partnership as a metaphor for the liberal dream of universal brotherhood.”

Sonny Terry was working as a street musician when he made his debut on record in 1937, accompanying Blind Boy Fuller. Fuller’s records were popular, and he had been recording regularly since 1935. Terry might have continued working in music at this marginal level, but for the operations of chance. John Hammond Sr had wanted to book Fuller for his ‘From Spirituals to Swing’ concert but found when he arrived in Durham that Fuller was in jail. As a result, it was Sonny Terry, led by Fuller’s washboard player, Bull City Red (George Washington) who appeared at Carnegie Hall just before Christmas 1938, and also, it now seems likely, at the second concert, a year later. These recordings were not released commercially until many years later, but the events brought Sonny Terry to the attention of folklorists like Alan Lomax, who noted him for the Library of Congress the day after the first concert, and to the musically inclined among the New York left.

In the short term, appearing at Carnegie Hall made little difference to Terry’s working life, and he went back to playing in Durham, and to recording with Fuller and Red, often as a member of ‘Brother George and His Sanctified Singers’, a recording group of shifting membership. Blind Boy Fuller’s health took a serious turn for the worse in 1940, and his manager, the entrepreneurially minded J.B. Long, was looking for other blues artists to present to OKeh. It appears that Long took Brownie McGhee and his harmonica player, Jordan Webb, to Chicago when Fuller, Terry and Red recorded in June 1940, and that Brownie sang a rather nervous and wooden ‘Precious Lord’, backed by Fuller, Red, and the two harps of Sonny Terry and Jordan Webb. The first Brownie McGhee record, then, was also the first Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee record. The recording cut after it was Blind Boy Fuller’s last, and by August Brownie McGhee was signed to OKeh, for whom he recorded regularly and quite extensively until October 1941.

In 1947 Brownie’s “Baseball Boogie” was attracting attention, the Terry/McGhee duo was seldom in a position to work together, for on 10 January 1947 Sonny Terry had opened in the role of ‘Sunny’ in the long running Broadway musical ‘Finian’s Rainbow. In March of that year, Terry made the first of a series of sessions for Capitol, which resulted in a number of uncompromising, and very good, blues records, which nevertheless seem to have been aimed primarily at white listeners. Brownie McGhee spent much of the late forties recording as a name artist for Savoy, producing a series of excellent R&B sides. McGhee cut his next big R&B hit, the suave ‘My Fault’, which finally persuaded Savoy to sign him on formal contract terms. Brownie was also supplementing his income by recording as a session guitarist for Continental, Apollo, Abbey and other companies. With his go-getting energy, and good contacts in both Harlem and the record industry, he was probably acting as a talent broker too; he made the connection between Gary Davis and Lenox, and may well have brought artists like Leroy Dallas, Big Chief Ellis and Ralph Willis to the notice of label owners and A&R men.

One musician who certainly owed his big break to Brownie was his brother, Stick (or Sticks, as the record companies frequently wrote it.) The story has often been told of how, in 1949, J. Mayo Williams unloaded his Harlem label’s remaining stock of Stick’s 1947 recording of ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’ to a distributor in New Orleans, where it began to receive airplay, and to sell out. Herb Abramson of Atlantic saw an opportunity, and asked Brownie if this Stick McGhee was by any chance a relative. Shortly, Atlantic had recut ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, it had reached number 3 in the charts, and Stick McGhee had become Atlantic’s first R&B star

As the decade changed, Brownie McGhee continued to record steadily as a name artist for Savoy, and for assorted labels as a session guitarist, while Sonny Terry appears to have begun the fifties by recording for the nascent Elektra label in the company of Alec Seward. He was also still recording informally with Woody Guthrie; the sessions were sometimes augmented by Guthrie’s acolyte, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and sometimes by Terry’s nephew, J.C. Burris, who had moved to New York in 1949. It has been said¹? that Terry and McGhee began their ‘folk’ period in 1955, shifting from black audiences to white, but it’s clear that both of them had always associated with white ‘urban folk’ musicians from the time of their arrival in New York, although Terry seems to have done so more consistently.

In the early fifties, McGhee and Terry were most closely associated with the clutch of labels owned by Bob and Morty Shad. It is only fair to note, however, that the resulting records, for Jax, Jackson, Harlem and Sittin’ In With, were some of the artists’ best work, whether rocking small group blues or acoustic duo performances. The early fifties can perhaps be summarized as a time of transition. Sessions for black-oriented labels were still plentiful, but Folkways seem to have been anxious to exploit the new long playing technology as a medium for extended documentation. It was in 1952 that Sonny Terry had his biggest hit, in the shape of ‘Hootin’ Blues’ on Gramercy. Jax and Red Robin billed him as ‘Sonny (Hootin) Terry’, and it appears that Savoy even called him in to overdub some whooping on a recording from 1944, so that they could reissue it as a similarly titled ‘Hootin’ The Blues’. Around this period Brownie, and sometimes Sonny, frequently accompanied Ralph Willis during his quite extensive recording career, but his easygoing charm had never resulted in popular acclaim. In January 1954 Terry participated in the last, impromptu studio session by Woody Guthrie.

Terry’s and McGhee’s last extensive engagement with the R&B market was the series of recordings made for Hy Weiss’s Old Town label between 1955 and 1958. As R&B sessions become less frequent, one way to read the discography at this date is to see it as increasingly featuring unusual, one-off sessions, like the brief contributions to Langston Hughes’ historical documentary, the 1957 session with Paul Robeson, or the two days of studio time purchased by TV personality and jazz fan Garry Moore, during which Sonny Terry gained the unlikely honor of making what seems to be the first blues recording with a string section. Sonny was debarred from other employment, and McGhee was also disabled, albeit to a lesser degree, but both of them were hustlers and strivers. It was the market that was changing, and they were still going after anything available. So it was, for instance, that in 1957 Brownie had his turn on Broadway, in Langston Hughes’ musical ‘Simply Heavenly’, and was hired to provide the guitar playing to which Andy Griffith mimed on a couple of numbers in the film ‘A Face In The Crowd’. A grateful Griffith presented McGhee with a Martin D18.

The sessions which can be read as affirming that the market for their music had changed decisively, and become overwhelmingly white, took place in March and November 1957, when they were appearing in the San Francisco production of ‘Cat On A Hot Tin Roof’, and were recommended to Fantasy Records by Barbara Dane.²? Although not quite the first occasion on which they had been jointly billed, these recordings can be seen as marking the moment when Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee became – in the eyes of many in their audience – ‘brownieandsonny.’ Perhaps because they were still working out how to be a ‘folk blues’ act, these Fantasy sessions are musically not very exciting. Also largely unsuccessful was an album for Folkways, also made in 1957, on which the two artists sang in duet extensively for the first time. As if to confirm that big changes were afoot, April 1958 saw the duo arriving in Britain, to tour with Chris Barber’s Jazz Band as replacements for the seriously ill, and soon to be dead, Big Bill Broonzy. The three men were close friends – Studs Terkel had devoted an episode of his radio programme to them in May 1957, and the results were issued on Folkways – and Brownie, for one, was adamant on his arrival in London that he was only making the trip as a favor to Bill. Terry and McGhee were recorded while in Britain, by Nixa, and on their return the following year by UK Columbia, a series of sessions which resulted in some of their best recordings for the ‘new’ audience. Back in the States, their association with Folkways continued, resulting in Sonny Terry’s first recordings on jew’s harp, while 1959 saw their first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, and the recording of a delightful set of children’s songs for Asman Edwards’ Choice label.

What with sessions at Newport in July, in London in October, and in both New Jersey and Los Angeles in December, it could be argued that the last half of 1959 is when the accusation of over-recording, so often thrown at Terry and McGhee, begins to have some weight. Between December 1959 and October 1960, they were jointly and separately responsible for five and a half albums for Prestige/Bluesville, and Terry played on another by Lightnin’ Hopkins. During this period, they also participated in the Davon ‘super session’ with Hopkins and Big Joe Williams which, its merits notwithstanding, must be among the most over-reissued of all blues albums. 1961 saw further sessions for Choice, for Davon again (the other candidate for most over-reissued session ever), and extensively for Fantasy, at Barbara Dane’s club, Sugar Hill. Things slowed down somewhat in 1962, which by September had produced only some accompaniments (mostly not issued until much later) to Luke ‘Long Gone’ Miles, and another album and a half for Bluesville.

There was a growing white demand for recorded blues, and as yet a shortage of musicians to meet that demand. The presence in New York of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, easily available, fluent performers and, particularly in McGhee’s case, prolific composers, who could be relied on to record a complete album in first takes, was, for Bluesville, an irresistible invitation to go in for intensive recording. The new blues audience, busy discovering Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, and soon to be thrilling to the ‘rediscovery’ of Son House, Skip James and others, often reacted dismissively to Terry and McGhee; as already noted, they shared with Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White the disadvantage that they were well known in folk and jazz circles, and so could not be seen as the exciting new discoveries of a privileged in-group. They also lacked both aggressive musical energy and unpolished rural backwardness, either or both of which would have generated many bonus points. Nevertheless, there was now a very large audience for their music in live performance, and from 1958 onwards they were touring almost continually, both within and beyond the United States.