Willie Brown

Life and career He learned to play the guitar as a teenager. He played with such notables as Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. He was not a self-promoting frontman, preferring to "second" other musicians. Little is known for certain about the man whom Johnson called "my friend Willie Brown" (in his "Cross Road Blues") and whom Johnson once indicated should be notified in event of his death.

Brown played with Patton on "M & O Blues" and "Future Blues", recorded for Paramount Records in 1930. Both songs appear on the album Son House & the Great Delta Blues Singers 1928–1930 (Document Records, 1994) and are also included in the JSP box set of Patton's recordings. At least four other songs Brown recorded for Paramount have never been found.

There has been speculation and some dispute about whether Brown played backup on "Rowdy Blues", and "Mississippi Bottom Blues", 1929 songs credited to Kid Bailey, or recorded it himself using the name of Kid Bailey.

The musicologist David Evans reconstructed the early biography of a Willie Brown living in Drew, Mississippi, until 1929. He was married by 1911, when he was 10 or 11(?), to a proficient guitarist named Josie Mills. He is recalled as singing and playing guitar with Patton and others in the neighborhood of Drew. Informants with conflicting memories led Gayle Dean Wardlow and Steve Calt to conclude that this was a different Willie Brown. Evans rejected this conclusion, believing that the singing and guitar style of the 1931 recordings is in the tradition of other performers from Drew, such as Patton, Tommy Johnson, Kid Bailey, Howlin' Wolf and artists not commercially recorded.

Alan Lomax, writing in 1993, suggested that the William Brown he recorded in Arkansas in 1942 was the same man as the Paramount artist. The recording was for a joint project between Fisk University and the Library of Congress documenting the music of Coahoma County, Mississippi, in 1941 and 1942. Writing over fifty years later, Lomax seemed to have forgotten that he had actually recorded Brown the previous summer with Son House, Fiddlin' Joe Martin and Leroy Williams. Brown played second guitar on three performances by the group and recorded one solo, "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor". Willie Brown also played "Ragged & Dirty". According to Lomax, after Willie played "Ragged & Dirty" for him, Brown quoted, "That's the blues, that's the Delta blues."

Discography Brown recorded six sides at a 1930 recording session in Grafton, Wisconsin. They were released on three 78-rpm shellac discs, of which only one has been found. Paramount 13090: "M & O Blues" / "Future Blues" (only six copies are known) Paramount 13099: "Window Blues" / "Kicking in My Sleep Blues" (no copy has been found) Library of Congress recording by Lomax: "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor"