BROWNIE McGHEE: THE COMPLETE BROWNIE McGHEE (1940-1941; 1994)
CD I: 1) Picking
My Tomatoes; 2) Me And My Dog Blues; 3) Born For Bad Luck; 4) I'm Callin' Daisy;
5) Step It Up And Go; 6) My Barkin' Bulldog Blues; 7) Let Me Tell You 'Bout My
Baby; 8) Prison Woman Blues; 9) Back Door Stranger; 10) Be Good To Me; 11) Not
Guilty Blues; 12) Coal Miner Blues; 13) Step It Up And Go No. 2; 14) Money
Spending Woman; 15) Death Of Blind Boy Fuller #1; 16) Death Of Blind Boy Fuller
#2; 17) Got To Find My Little Woman; 18) I'm A Black Woman's Man #1; 19) I'm A
Black Woman's Man #2; 20) Dealing With The Devil; 21) Double Trouble #1; 22)
Double Trouble #2; 23) Woman, I'm Done.
CD
II: 1) Key To My Door; 2) Million Lonesome Women; 3) Ain't No Tellin'; 4) Try
Me One More Time; 5) I Want To See Jesus; 6) Done What My Lord Said; 7) I Want
King Jesus; 8) What Will I Do (Without The Lord); 9) Key To The Highway 70 #1;
10) Key To The Highway 70 #2; 11) I Don't Believe In Love; 12) So Much Trouble;
13) Good-Bye Now; 14) Jealous Of My Woman; 15) Unfair Blues; 16) Barbecue Any
Old Time; 17) Workingman's Blues; 18) Sinful Disposition Woman; 19) Back Home
Blues; 20) Deep Sea Diver; 21) It Must Be Love; 22) Studio Chatter; 23) Swing,
Soldier, Swing #1; 24) Swing, Soldier, Swing #2.
Any album that says Complete is rarely so, and, of course, this one is nowhere near a
true «complete», not even close — but it does
contain all or most of the recordings that Walter Brown McGhee, a.k.a.
«Brownie», made for Okeh and Columbia Records in 1940-41. Apparently, the
labels hired him because of growing demand on what would later be known as
«Piedmont blues»: their chief star in that genre, Blind Boy Fuller, was selling
reasonably well, but was not altogether reliable (certainly not in the wake of
a brief prison term in 1938, and especially
after having died in 1941), so they thought it wouldn't hurt to hire one more
guitar-playing kid.
Brownie, who was self-taught and also used to
sing with a local harmony group in Kingsport, Tennessee, must have been one of
the smoothest, steadiest, «normal-est» country blues people in existence. He
cherished his rural roughness, never going for a «slick» urbanized attitude,
but he never imposed that roughness
on people, either — everything he plays here is supposed to entertain, not
scare people or induce any sort of religious or just plain soulful haze.
Granted, in today's world it would have hardly counted as entertainment,
either, because Brownie's motto may be decoded as «nothing out of the ordinary, just 12-bar blues guitar playing and
by-the-book blues singing». Disregarding slight alternations in tempos (to some
of these tunes you sit and tap your foot, to some of them you jiggle and
wiggle), the absolute majority of these 47 tracks are completely
interchangeable.
Even when Brownie pays tribute to his deceased
mentor, Blind Boy Fuller, captured here in two subsequent takes, there is not a
shred of extra emotion in his voice and not a single alternation in the regular
chord sequences. Some might attribute this to lack of talent, others, on the
contrary, will praise the man for keeping a steady footing and not allowing to
sacrifice his «realistic» manner of performing for empty ritualistic purposes.
Who really knows? But, naturally, it is best not to judge ʽDeath Of Blind Boy
Fullerʼ on its own, and, instead, try to get a general feel for Brownie's
unassuming playing over the course of those 2 CDs (although, unless you are
using this for background purposes, I certainly wouldn't recommend forcing
yourself to sit through all the 47 tracks at once — pretty soon you will be
getting the obligatory Groundhog Day
feeling).
On most of the tracks, Blind Boy is not
completely alone, but fairly often he is being backed only by a washboard
percussion player (Bull City Red or Washboard Slim) and/or a harmonica partner
(Jordan Webb; later on, Sonny Terry joins in for a couple of tracks, but the
real partnership between Brownie and Sonny would not truly begin until after
the war). The washboard adds a little extra liveliness and, considering
Brownie's almost «pedantic» approach to guitar playing, sometimes sounds like the actual lead instrument — but still, this
is mostly a solo endeavour, and it is only because McGhee's playing technique
is so similar on most of the tracks that one's attention might eventually shift
to the scraping, grating, clicking, and clanging of percussion.
Most of the songs happened to be captured in
pristine clarity (at least, for 1940), so there is at least one serious
advantage to this package: if you want a solid, «no-nonsense», comprehensive,
perfectly listenable sample of pre-war country blues, this just might be the package to get. Unless you happen to
be a seriously refined blues scholar, there is nothing particularly distinctive
about it, but this is also what makes these songs such a perfect primer for
getting into the spirit of what it was all about — without getting carried too
far away by Charlie Patton's subhuman growling, Bo Carter's obscene innuendos,
Lonnie Johnson's virtuoso soloing, Blind Willie McTell's «woman voice», etc.
etc. In addition, Brownie puts his «generic stamp» on a variety of styles — ragtime,
jug band, gospel — enough to assess the general range of popular black
entertainment.
So it's all quite instructive, and those who
have the patience to sit through it all will be rewarded at the end with a double-take
bouncy guitar duet between Brownie and Buddy Moss from October 1941, back when
Buddy was freshly released from jail and eager to reclaim his status of one of
the hottest players on the East Coast. However, flashy guitar sparring is
simply not what this is all about —
more like it's all about a handy, well-illustrated manual for every aspiring
acoustic blues player. Great sound, perfect self-assurance, total lack of
individual personality: the hard-to-catch «folk spirit» speaking directly to
the listener. Thumbs
up, if only for this strange feeling of «total impersonality» that
emanates from every pore of the record.
Check "The Complete Brownie McGhee" (CD) on Amazon
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