Willie Brown (musician)

Grave of Willie Brown

Willie Brown (born August 6, 1900 in Clarksdale , Mississippi , † December 30, 1952 in Tunica , Mississippi ) was an American blues guitarist and singer.

Live and act

Brown was born the son of a sharecropper and grew up on a plantation near Drew, Mississippi. From the mid-1920s to around 1930 he was the backing guitarist for Charley Patton , after which he moved in the same capacity to Son House , with whom he worked during the 1930s and partly in the 1940s. In the early 1930s he was the mentor and teacher of Robert Johnson , who later mentioned him in his song Crossroad Blues : You can run, you can run ... tell my friend Willie Brown.

During a recording session with Patton and House for Paramount in Grafton , Wisconsin in 1930 , he recorded four pieces, of which only the songs M & O Blues and Future Blues have survived (from Paramount 13099, "Kicking In My Sleep" is not a surviving one Copy known). In 1941 Alan Lomax made field recordings with Willie Brown and Son House, including the Brown solo Make Me a Pallet on the Floor . A short time later he went with House to Rochester , New York, but later returned to the Mississippi Delta. There Brown gradually fell into oblivion, and very little is known of his final years. He died in 1952 and was no longer able to benefit from the blues revival of the 1960s.

Despite his main role as accompanist and his extremely narrow surviving work, Brown was a major figure in the blues who, together with musicians such as Charley Patton and Son House, decisively shaped the Delta Blues .

Trivia

In the movie Crossroads - Pact with the Devil a / the Willie Brown still lives in the 80s. In the story, he and the young Eugene go on a search for the lost 30th song by Robert Johnson.

literature

• Robert Santelli, The Big Book of Blues: A Biographical Encyclopedia , 1993, ISBN 0140159398 .