Brownie McGhee

Walter Brown "Brownie" McGhee was born on November 30, 1915, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Kingsport, Tennessee. Around the age of four, he contracted polio, which severely limited the use of his right leg; surgery funded by the March of Dimes later allowed him to walk. His father, George McGhee, was a factory worker known on University Avenue for playing guitar and singing. McGhee's uncle constructed him a guitar from a tin marshmallow box and a piece of board, and McGhee spent his youth singing with a local harmony group called the Golden Voices Gospel Quartet while teaching himself guitar. He also learned five-string banjo, ukulele, and piano. His brother Granville, nicknamed "Stick" for pushing young Brownie around in a cart, later became a musician himself and composed "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee."

At twenty-two, McGhee became a traveling musician, joining the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and forming a close association with Blind Boy Fuller, whose guitar style shaped McGhee's own approach. Following Fuller's death in 1941, J. B. Long of Columbia Records promoted McGhee under the name "Blind Boy Fuller No. 2." McGhee was recording for Columbia's subsidiary Okeh Records in Chicago at the time, but his career gained significant momentum after he relocated to New York in 1942 and partnered with harmonica player Sonny Terry, whom he had first met in 1939 when Terry was playing with Fuller. The duo became an immediate success, recording and touring together until around 1980, with the most intensive period of their collaboration running from 1958 onward, during which they spent approximately eleven months of each year on the road and recorded dozens of albums.

In the 1940s, before their reputation as folk purists took hold, Terry and McGhee fronted a jump blues combo featuring honking saxophone and rolling piano, performing under names including "Brownie McGhee and his Jook House Rockers" and "Sonny Terry and his Buckshot Five," often alongside Champion Jack Dupree and Big Chief Ellis. The pair also brought their music to the Broadway stage, appearing in the original productions of Finian's Rainbow and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. McGhee's Broadway activity is documented between 1955 and 1957, with credits that include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the musical Simply Heavenly. During the blues revival of the 1960s, Terry and McGhee became fixtures on the concert and festival circuits, largely remaining faithful to their musical roots.

In 1982, McGhee and Terry were both awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts; that year's fellowships were the first the NEA had bestowed. Later in his life, McGhee took on acting roles in film and television. He and Terry appeared together in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy The Jerk. In 1987, McGhee played the blues singer Toots Sweet in the supernatural thriller Angel Heart, a performance that film critic Roger Ebert singled out for praise, writing that McGhee delivered a "performance that proves Dexter Gordon isn't the only old musician who can act." McGhee appeared in a 1988 episode of Family Ties titled "The Blues, Brother," playing a fictional blues musician named Eddie Dupre, and in a 1989 episode of Matlock titled "The Blues Singer," in which he provided the singing voice and guitar playing for Joe Seneca's character and performed a version of "The Midnight Special" alongside Seneca and star Andy Griffith.

In 1971, Happy Traum, a former guitar student of McGhee's, edited a blues guitar instruction guide and songbook titled Guitar Styles of Brownie McGhee, which included an autobiographical section in which McGhee discussed his upbringing, his musical beginnings, and the history of the blues from the 1930s onward. One of McGhee's final concert appearances took place at the 1995 Chicago Blues Festival. He died of stomach cancer on February 16, 1996, in Oakland, California, at the age of eighty. McGhee was portrayed by Joshua Henry in the 2024 film A Complete Unknown.