Gabriel Brown

Gabriel Brown (September 2, 1910 – May 7, 1960) was an American Piedmont blues singer, guitarist, and actor whose career spanned folk performance, Federal Theatre, Broadway, radio, and recording.

Brown was born in Gretna, Gadsden County, Florida, the son of Mattie (née Gainous) and Steve Brown Jr. The family relocated to Eatonville before 1918 and later settled in Linden, New Jersey, where Brown worked as a laborer in a chemical plant. Some sources indicate he graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, though this has not been confirmed.

After learning guitar, Brown performed with the Sun-to-Sun Singers, a vocal group connected to folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. In 1934 he appeared at the first National Folk Festival in St. Louis, Missouri. The following year, Hurston arranged for Alan Lomax to record Brown for the Library of Congress, sessions that took place in June 1935. Hurston also cast Brown in her light opera Polk County and arranged for him to be photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

Brown subsequently moved to New York City, where in 1935 he began a four-year association with the Federal Theatre Project as both actor and musician. Among the productions he appeared in was the celebrated staging of Macbeth directed by Orson Welles, commonly known as Voodoo Macbeth, which brought Brown to Broadway in 1936. Toward the end of the decade he performed as a singer on Cincinnati radio and participated in the production St. Louis 'Oman. He later secured civil service employment with the Army Signal Corps in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

His first full recording session took place in 1943 under producer Joe Davis, a professional relationship that continued through Brown's final sessions in 1952. Tracks from those years were licensed to Coral Records in the late 1940s, and when Davis moved into A&R at MGM Records, Brown followed, where the label marketed him as a pop singer. Several of his recordings went unreleased during his lifetime, and some that were issued lacked accurate or appropriate promotion. Posthumous compilations of his work have been released by multiple labels, including Policy Wheel, Krazy Kat, Flyright, and Catfish Records.

Brown died on May 7, 1960, following a boating accident off the coast of New Jersey. Some sources have incorrectly placed his death in Florida in 1972.