Walter Brown "Brownie" McGhee was an American folk music and Piedmont blues singer and guitarist, best known for his collaboration with the harmonica player Sonny Terry.
11 Facts About Brownie McGhee
2.
Brownie McGhee's uncle made him a guitar from a tin marshmallow box and a piece of board.
3.
Brownie McGhee spent much of his youth immersed in music, singing with a local harmony group, the Golden Voices Gospel Quartet, and teaching himself to play guitar.
4.
Brownie McGhee played the five-string banjo and ukulele and studied piano.
5.
At the age of 22, Brownie McGhee became a traveling musician, working in the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and befriending Blind Boy Fuller, whose guitar playing influenced him greatly.
6.
Late in his life, Brownie McGhee appeared in small roles in films and on television.
7.
In 1987, Brownie McGhee gave a small but memorable performance as the ill-fated blues singer Toots Sweet in the supernatural thriller movie Angel Heart.
8.
Brownie McGhee appeared in the television series Matlock, in a 1989 episode entitled "The Blues Singer", playing a friend of an old blues musician who is accused of murder.
9.
Happy Traum, a former guitar student of McGhee's, edited a blues guitar instruction guide and songbook, Guitar Styles of Brownie McGhee, published in 1971, in which McGhee, between lessons, talked about his life and the blues.
10.
The autobiographical section features Brownie McGhee talking about growing up, his musical beginnings, and a history of the blues from the 1930s onward.
11.
Brownie McGhee died of stomach cancer on February 16,1996, in Oakland, California, at the age of 80.