Brownie Mcghee

Sometimes, if you're not careful, precious little gems slip by. Because this isn't any old Sonny & Brownie reprint, it's the glorious Folkways recordings!
On this 2CD set you get the full tracks of four Folkways 10" LPs plus eight bonus cuts taken from various parts of their career. Choice stuff indeed and rare too. If you were to bid for the four albums included, you'd need around £400 to win them.
CD 1 contains the 1952 album ‘Get On Board', the seven cuts from the 1956 Folkways album ‘Washboard Band-Country Dance Music' - a kind of a Almanac Singers gung-ho session supervised by the ubiquitous and as-always-over-enthusiastic Pete Seeger plus four blues from the 1940s……

Well, complete as far as his pre-war country blues waxings for OKeh sans Sonny Terry (except for one or two where the whooping harpist provided accompaniment). McGhee was working firmly in the Piedmont tradition by 1940, when he signed with OKeh and began cutting the 47 enlightening sides here, which represent some of the purest country blues he ever committed to posterity.

Sonny Terry started playing harp in his teens, as a blind street musician in North Carolina. After a stint with a medicine show, he hooked p with the popular ragtime singer/guitarist, Blind Boy Fuller. When he was 23 he made his recording debut, backing up Fuller. Barely a year later in 1938, he was wowing New York audiences at Carnegie Hall, appearing solo as part of John Hammond's Spirituals to Swing concert. After Fuller's death in 1940, Terry teamed with Brownie McGhee and the two began a long lived musical partnership.

Walter Brown McGhee (1915-1996) was an articulate spokesman for the blues who, in partnership with Sonny Terry, proselytized the buoyant Piedmont-blues-style to folk audiences a decade before most ever heard of the Mississippi Delta. Tennessee born, Carolina-influenced, New York based in his 'folk boom' glory and a Californian at the time of his death, Brownie showed a wide stylistic range from turn-of-the-century ragtime ('Come On Keep It Coming') to the lyrical sophistication of such original songs as 'Conversation With A River'.

In a way, this is the veteran duo's version of Fathers and Sons, a meeting of old black bluesmen with young white admirers that Muddy Waters and Otis Spann cut with Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield. John Mayall and John Hammond, Jr. are among the "youngsters" on this powerful statement that includes a definitive version of Randy Newman's wickedly subtle anti-slavery tune "Sail Away." Sonny Terry's trademark whoops are energizing. The repartee between him and Brownie McGhee might convince you they were fast friends if you didn't know otherwise.

Here's an 18-track collection of McGhee's earliest recordings, all of it emanating from sessions held in 1940 and the following year…..