Singin' the Blues in Kingsport

 

Legendary Blues Singer and Guitarist Brownie McGhee 

Brownie McGhee finally got his due.

McGhee, blues singer and guitarist extraordinaire, half of the famed duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and household name in Europe, finally got a plaque on Kingsport’s Broad Street.

McGhee is practically unknown in his hometown of Kingsport but he is well-known all over the world for his musical accomplishments.

He played with virtually every famous blues musician of the twentieth century from Blind Boy Fuller to Leadbelly. (He even shared a New York loft with Leadbelly and his wife for two years.)

He recorded hundreds of songs – he didn’t even know how many – for a couple of dozen different labels, from Okeh (a division of Columbia) to Folkways and Mercury. He had a Billboard Top 5 hit with “My Fault” in 1948. He performed in Carnegie Hall and at the Newport Folk Festival. 

Until last month when the Tennessee Music Pathways project erected his plaque in Glen Bruce Park he had never been fully recognized in Kingsport.

But Kingsport is where he got his musical start. He says in his autobiography, a ten-page section of a 1971 guitar instruction manual that he authored with folk singer Happy Traum, that the first theater he ever played in was the Gem on Main Street.

Walter Brown McGhee was born in Knoxville on Nov. 30, 1915 to George “Duff” McGhee and Zella Henley McGhee. The McGhees moved to Kingsport the next year when George found work at the Federal Dyestuff plant. On his 1917 draft registration card George said they were living in “Dye Plant Camp,” which was located where Riverview now stands.

In the 1920 census they had moved to Maple Street and now had four children, daughters Ella, 8, and Vedia, 6, and sons Brownie, 4, and Granville, 1. A year later a Kingsport Times story reported they were living on Oak Street.

Brownie writes that he contracted polio around this time. His brother Granville would push him around town in a wagon using a stick, and thus Granville would become known as Stick or Sticks. (Brownie calls him “Sticks” in his autobiography; Granville’s family-written obituary in the Kingsport Times News in 1961 also called him “Sticks.”)

Sticks would become a famous musician in his own right, composing and recording “Drinking Wine Spo-dee-o-dee,” and deserving of his own Tennessee Music Pathways plaque. (We will leave that argument for another day.)

Granville "Sticks" McGhee, left, playing with brother Brownie McGhee

In 1922 George and Zella McGhee separated. “My song ‘Born With The Blues’ is true,” Brownie would write. “I'm from a broken home.”

 He says neither he nor Granville received any musical training growing up. “During the time that I was coming up, you understand, they figured that a boy child didn't need an education, he was going to earn his living by manual labor. But my two sisters were given music. My father gave my sisters a piano and imported a man for fifty miles to give them lessons. They never learned, so he gave me and my brother the piano, figured we'd tear it up and get it out of the house, but we learned to pick out notes on it. So the piano was my first love, although I was exposed to the guitar at the same time. I really started by playing a Prince Albert tobacco can with rubber bands on it. I would strike those strings and beat it with the back of my hand. My father would play his guitar. This was when I was a little kid, maybe six or seven years old.”

Brownie didn’t let his physical handicap slow him down. He attended Douglass School, then located on East Center, and participated in Choir and Drama. In March 1935 he was part of a Douglass musical group that went to Nashville to compete in the state quartet singing competition (they finished third). Other members of the group were Hubert Armstrong, Simpson Brown (father of basketball star Skip Brown) and Caldwell Hemphill.

Brownie notes, “What little money my father had saved, why he spent it all trying to rid me of that infantile paralysis, which was never successful.”

Nurse Kate Fullbright, center in apron, helped Brownie get surgery on his leg. 

It took a sympathetic Kingsport School system nurse, Kate Fullbright, to get him treatment. “I had crutches and a cane until I was 18 or 19 years old. Then I met up with a fabulous lady out of Texas, Mrs. Fullbright. She was the nurse at the Negro schools at the time, and she figured I could be helped and get rid of the crutches and cane, which she did. She met a German doctor at the time of Roosevelt's administration when the March of Dimes was started (he was a victim of polio too), and she said, ‘Brownie, I think I can help you. Would you like to walk without crutches or a cane?’ I said, ‘Yes, I would love that.’ So, my case was taken, and this German doctor operated on me around '35 or '36, and today instead of having my foot five inches from the ground it's an inch and a quarter. No crutch and no cane, pretty good.”

By now Brownie was playing guitar anywhere and everywhere he could around town: at school, in church, at house parties and barbecues. Then he heard about a talent contest. “I had a fellow playing with me called Lesley Riddle. He played mandolin, guitar, and piano, and I played piano and guitar. The first theater I ever worked was the Gem Theatre in Kingsport. Him and me did that song, ‘What's The Reason That I'm Not Pleasin' You,’ and ‘Roll Out The Barrel, We’ll Have a Barrel of Fun’ and we won the ten bucks!”

It could have been this 1937 talent contest that Brownie and Lesley Riddle entered. 

That was all the impetus Brownie needed. He soon hit the road, walking and hitch-hiking, seeking his fortune as a wandering minstrel. At first Lesley Riddle went with him. “But he turned around and come back. So that got me on the adventure of continuing on.”

From Kingsport he made his way east to Winston-Salem and Greensboro and Burlington, where he met up with a talent scout for Okeh Records, J.B. Long, who signed him to a contract.

“One of my records was put on the back of one of Blind Boy Fuller’s, and that turned out to be a big seller. ‘Fuller's Bus Rider Blues’ and my ‘Me and My Dog’ were back to back.”

“The Dog” of the title didn’t refer to an actual dog but to a piece of cardboard with the RCA logo dog that Brownie had found and tacked on his wall in Kingsport.

It was also during his stay in North Carolina that he met a blind harmonica player from Georgia named Saunders Terrell. He and Terrell, who was known on stage as Sonny Terry, would play together off and on, mostly on, for the rest of their lives. The partnership was good for both of them.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee in a 1960 promotional photo.

“My first professional job with Sonny Terry was May 20, 1942 with Paul Robeson in Riverside Stadium in Washington, D.C. I had met Leadbelly by this time. Sonny was coming up to do this show with Paul Robeson, and they wanted to know if there was somebody else that would bring Sonny along. So I come up with Sonny, and when I got there I was put on the show.”

The concert was a benefit for the Highlander School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and Robeson thought it would be appropriate to have someone from Tennessee on the bill.

“I did ‘Kansas City’ and I really got a kick and a bang out of it. I had studied about Paul Robeson in school, and being on stage with him was such a gas.”

That was the beginning of a long and successful career in music. Over the next five decades Brownie performed and recorded with all the big names in blues and folk music.

“When I came to New York I had met everybody - Pete Seeger, Josh White, Lee Hays, Betty Sanders, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Sis Cunningham.”

He was in two Broadway shows, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Langston Hughes “Simply Heaven.” (He rehearsed for a month to be in a third, “All Yours” starring Woody Guthrie. But a petulant Guthrie refused to show up for opening night because of a disagreement with the director and the show never opened. Brownie wasn’t concerned. “I was getting forty-five dollars a week for rehearsing, which was a lot of money in 1942.”)

Mick and Keith (yeah, those two from the Rolling Stones) told Anthony Mason on “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2016 that they found blues music through Sonny and Brownie. “Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee was the first blues people I saw on TV when I was really young,” Mick said.

Mick and Keith have known about Brownie McGhee for years. Now at last all of Kingsport knows about him thanks to that plaque on Broad Street.  

To hear Brownie's recording of "Me and My Dog" click on the image below or paste the link below it in your browser if the image doesn't show up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztC37-tnI_c

To hear his hit record "My Fault" click on the image below or paste the link link below it in your browser if the image doesn't show up on your screen:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T29jUlXW53c

Brownie’s Kingsport addresses:

In 1917 the McGhee family was living in the Dye Plant Camp, approximately where Riverview is today.

In the 1920 census they had moved to Maple Street. And in a 1921 Kingsport Times news story they were now on Oak Street.

In the 1935 City Directory the McGhees were living at 905 Walnut.

When “Walter Brownie McGhee” registered for the draft in 1942, he was living at 814 Walnut Street, Apartment 3, in Kingsport and listed his employer as O.K. Recording Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He named his father George as his contact at 905½ East Sullivan. His draft card said he was 5’8” and weighed 155 pounds.