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78 RPM Record

Artist: Milton Brown And His Brownies Label:   Decca Country: USA Catalogue: 5070 Date: Feb 1935 Format: 10" Collection:   I Own It     I Want It  Community:  2 Own Price Guide: $27 » Search eBay #AD  » Search Amazon #AD This site contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.

PRICE GUIDE $27

Track	Artist	Title	Composer	Rating
A	Milton Brown And His Brownies	St. Louis Blues	Handy	10.0  Rate
B	Milton Brown And His Brownies	A Good Man Is Hard To Find	Green	10.0  Rate

Notes

Milton Brown And His Brownies:
Milton Brown (vocals), Derwood Brown (guitar), Cecil Brower (fiddle), Ocie Stockard (tenor banjo), Bob Dunn (electric steel guitar), Wanna Coffman (string bass), Fred Calhoun (piano).
Recorded January 27, 1935, Furniture Mart Building, 666 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL, mx: C-9698 (A), C-9697 (B).

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Comments and Reviews

fixbutte 23rd Jul 2015		First set of Decca labels with the "sunburst" design {Images #803741 & 803742} now added. The later "block box" design {Images #802200 & 802201} was not introduced before 1938, showing that the Brownies records were still much in demand then, although Milton Brown had died on April 18, 1936 from the consequences of a car accident, only 32 years old. The Brownies, now led by Milton's brother Derwood Brown, would only make one more recording session for Decca in February 1937, under the name of Milton Brown’s Musical Cowboys.
fixbutte 21st Jul 2015		I have added the lineup for the recording session according to Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942 by Tony Russell and Bob Pinson. Praguefrank is wrong here because he forgot Cecil Brower whose violin is unmistakably present on the session. (Brower would leave the Brownies temporarily in 1935 but come back before the next recording session in March 1936.) The January 27 & 28, 1935 session was also the first one with Bob Dunn who was the first man ever to play an electric guitar in a studio on this occasion. For the details see an article in the FI magazine of June 1997 by Robert Palmer: Good as they were already, the Brownies made a quantum leap when they hired Bob Dunn late in 1934. Born in Oklahoma in 1908, Dunn was proficient on jazz trombone as well as steel guitar. He had reportedly copied his homemade amplification rig from a Rube Goldberg-like electric guitar contraption played by an unnamed black street performer. Dunn first encountered the man playing for tips on the Coney Island boardwalk, later following him all the way to New Orleans in order to complete his "studies." Amplified guitar was an idea whose time had come; within a year of Dunn's recording debut, jazz guitarist Eddie Durham (who also doubled on trombone) and others were hauling their own jerry-rigged amps into the recording studios. But Dunn's first, marathon sessions with the Brownies on January 27th and 28th, 1935, apparently mark the first appearance of an amplified guitar on a commercial recording. They also constitute the recording debut of one of the most singularly imaginative and off-the-wall instrumental stylists in the annals of American popular music.
fixbutte 21st Jul 2015		The new verses of Milton Brown's "St. Louis Blues" are quoted in Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927-63 by Peter Stanfield (note 36 on page 197): Come here and tell me baby, whose muddy shoes are these? Come here and tell me baby, whose muddy shoes are these? 'cause they are sitting right here where my shoes ought to be. I woke up this morning, between midnight and day I woke up this morning, between midnight and day You ought to see me grab that pillow where my sweet mama used to lay. Only the last verse comes from the familiar "St. Louis Blues" lyrics as used since the early 1920s: Lord, I love that gal like a school boy loves his pie, Just like an old Kentucky colonel loves his rock and rye, I'm gonna love that gal until the day I die.
fixbutte 21st Jul 2015		"St. Louis Blues", W.C. Handy's famous blues best known as sung by Bessie Smith, was also vital for the emergence of Western swing, see Wikipedia: (Milton) Brown began his musical career in 1930, when he met Bob Wills at a local Fort Worth dance. The Wills Fiddle Band was a fiddle band made up of Wills on fiddle and Herman Arnspiger on guitar. They were performing at a local Fort Worth dance and Brown joined the group on a chorus of "St. Louis Blues". Wills was impressed with Brown's voice and immediately asked him and his guitarist brother, Derwood, to join the band. This band would become the first incarnation of the Light Crust Doughboys, who made only one record under the name Fort Worth Doughboys but spawned two of the most important bands of Western swing, Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys and Milton Brown And His (Musical) Brownies. Not by chance, "St. Louis Blues" belonged to the first recordings of both bands. Whereas Bob Wills' version, on his very first record with the Texas Playboys in Oct 1935, keeps close to the original lyrically (though in a funny way), Milton Brown's version of some months before is quite different, mostly instrumental with newly created lyrics except some lines of the sped up finale.
xiphophilos 21st Jul 2015		A Side: B Side (unfortunately probably not available to listeners outside the US)

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