Sonny Terry

Saunders Terrell, born October 24, 1911, in Greensboro, Georgia, was an American Piedmont blues and folk musician who performed under the name Sonny Terry. He is recognized for an energetic harmonica style that incorporated vocal whoops and hollers, as well as imitations of trains and fox hunts.

Terry's father, a farmer, introduced him to the blues harmonica during his youth. Injuries to both eyes left him blind by age 16, making farm labor impossible and pushing him toward music as a livelihood. He began performing blues in Shelby, North Carolina, and later partnered with Piedmont blues guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. After Fuller's death in 1941, Terry formed a lasting musical partnership with Brownie McGhee, and the two recorded extensively together. During the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, the duo reached wide audiences through collaborations with Woody Guthrie and Moses Asch, producing recordings for Folkways Records. In the 1940s, Terry and McGhee also fronted a jump blues combo billed variously as "Brownie McGhee and his Jook House Rockers" or "Sonny Terry and his Buckshot Five."

Terry's career included several landmark early appearances. In 1938 he performed at Carnegie Hall for the first From Spirituals to Swing concert and recorded for the Library of Congress that same year. His first commercial recordings followed in 1940. Among his best-known compositions are "Old Jabo," a song about a snakebite, and "Lost John," which showcases his breath control on the harmonica.

Terry appeared on Broadway between 1947 and 1955. He was a member of the original 1947 cast of the musical comedy Finian's Rainbow, and he also appeared in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In 1979, he and McGhee appeared together in the Steve Martin comedy film The Jerk. Terry went on to appear in Steven Spielberg's 1985 film The Color Purple. He collaborated with Ry Cooder on "Walkin' Away Blues" and recorded a cover of Robert Johnson's "Crossroad Blues" for the 1986 film Crossroads.

In 1982, Terry and McGhee each received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. Those fellowships were the first the NEA had bestowed. Terry died of natural causes in Mineola, New York, on March 11, 1986, three days before Crossroads was released in theaters. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame that same year.