Brownie McGhee Biography

Fast Facts

• An advocate for civil rights, he refused to play for segregated audiences
• Started out playing blues in traveling tent shows in the southern United States
• Appeared with Blind Sonny Terry on Broadway in Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and Langston Hughes's "Simply Heaven․"
• Met his long time musical partner Blind Sonny Terry in 1939 and formed a popular blues duo in which he sang and played guitar and Terry played harmonica
• His first guitar was made by his uncle out of a piece of board and a tin marshmallow box
• Offered guitar lessons at Brownie McGhee's School of Blues, which he opened in Harlem
• As he was lame and his partner Blind Sonny Terry was blind, the two would compensate for each other's weaknesses on and off the stage