It Matters and of Course I'll Tell You Why...

 Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s I was lucky enough to see blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee two times. I can't really take any credit for knowing much about them at the time. I was a big blues fan and they performed in a small bar that is now a parking lot in an East Texas collage town. All my friends were going and many of those there that evening are still my friends. All this is as good a reason as you can find to realize that Black History matters. 

Sonny,  a harmonica player lost his sight to injuries by the time he was 16. That left him music as one of the only ways to make a living and he began performing around North Carolina. By 1938 he appeared at Carnegie Hall as part of promoter John Hammond's Spirituals to Swing Concert and recorded for the Library of Congress. He teamed with Brownie by the 1940s and was in the original Broadway cast of Finian's Rainbow and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Musicologist Ned Sublette links Sonny's harp style to the music of African Pigmies who using what a European would call pan pipes alternated sung notes and blown notes to tell the story of the hunt. Sonny recorded "Fox Chase" in 1938 alternating whoops with the harp notes to add to the ancient tribal story of how to hunt large game without getting stepped on. 

Brownie was a guitar player. Reportedly his father forbid him to learn slide guitar because "once you start sliding, you never go back" and he mastered folk and Piedmont styles. With Sonny they fronted folk and jump blues bands, appeared on Broadway and in later years movies and TV. Brownie had polio at age 4 and the March of Dimes paid for the surgery that enabled him to walk. I noted Brownie's compensated gait pattern as he took the stage on the evenings I saw him play. It was not pretty but like Sonny's blindness it did not stop him from a lifetime of accomplishments. 

In 1982, not too long after I saw Sonny and Brownie they were awarded a National Heritage Fellowship  by the National Endowment for the arts. That's the United States Highest honor for the Folk and Traditional Arts.

I think Sonny and Brownie went their sperate ways late in their careers and I have always enjoyed this Sonny/Johnny Winter and Willie Dixon release.

 The gigs I saw Sonny and Brownie play the closer was always the Leadbelly tune Good Night Irene. Young, white, college student long haired hippies hoisted beers and sang the lyrics like they wrote them. I have occasionally sang that song with some of those same people since then.  

If you don't think all this matters, the blues, black history, polio, the March of Dimes, Broadway, Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress I don't know what I'm gonna do with you.  

  www.venmo.com/u/Carl-Wallace-23