Cleo Brown

Cleo Brown, born Cleopatra Brown on December 8, 1909, in De Kalb, Mississippi, was an American blues and jazz vocalist and pianist. Though her birthplace has been listed in various publications as Meridian, Mississippi, Brown clarified in a 1986 interview with W. Balliett published in The New Yorker that she was born in De Kalb shortly before her father accepted a pastoral position in Meridian. She played piano at her Baptist church during childhood. In 1919, her family relocated to Chicago, where she studied piano with her brother, who had worked with "Pine Top" Smith and played boogie-woogie for dances. By around 1923, Brown was performing in vaudeville and taking engagements at clubs.

Her career extended to Broadway, where she appeared in productions between 1927 and 1928. Her credits from that period include the musical Animal Crackers and the play Lovely Lady.

In 1935, Brown replaced Fats Waller as the pianist on New York radio station WABC. Her stride piano playing drew frequent comparisons to Waller, and she is credited as an influence on both Dave Brubeck, who played during intermissions at her shows, and Marian McPartland. Brubeck later recorded the song "Sweet Cleo Brown" as a tribute to her. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Brown toured the United States extensively, recording for Decca Records and Capitol Records, among other labels. Her recorded catalog included titles such as "Breakin' in a New Pair of Shoes," "Mama Don't Want No Peas and Rice and Coconut Oil," "When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan," and "The Stuff Is Here and It's Mellow." Her discography includes the album Living in the Afterglow, released on Audiophile in 1989, and the compilation 1935–1951 on Chronological Classics.

As her religious beliefs deepened, Brown moved away from performing bawdy blues material. She was baptized in 1953, retired from music, and became a nurse in 1959. Her long absence from the music world led jazz biographies to mistakenly list her as deceased. From the mid-1970s until 1981, she performed under the name C. Patra Brown on radio programs in Denver, Colorado, replacing boogie-woogie with slower, inspirational music. She subsequently returned to recording and appeared on National Public Radio. Brown was the first woman instrumentalist to receive the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship. She had a son, Matthew, and four grandchildren. Brown died on April 15, 1995, in Denver, Colorado.