Listening to Prestige 552: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee

LISTEN TO ONE: Backwater Blues

 People tend to remember how the British invasion of the mid-1960s, starting with the Beatles in 1964, changed the face of popular music and put an end to the careers of a lot of American performers. But it's worth noting how it changed the perception of blues. Blues performers had been a part of the acoustic folk music revival that had put down roots in the 1940s with folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, and had begun to blossom in the 1950s, with folk music coffee houses in northern cities and college towns, and folk festivals, the most significant of which was the 1959 debut of the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, RI, site of the already well-established Newport Jazz Festival. Amplified blues performers like

Muddy Waters or B. B. King were relegated to the "chitlin' circuit" of rhythm and blues and jazz acts whose audiences were primarily, often exclusively Black. 

But if white audiences in America weren't listening to Black electric blues people, young British audiences, and especially young British musicians, certainly were, starting with Muddy Waters' first trip to England in 1958. When those electric blues-influenced British musicians started touring America, they were bringing it all back home, to borrow a phrase from another American folk musician turned electric. By the time of the first all-blues festival, in Ann Arbor, MI. in 1969, the electric acts were in the ascendant.

So performers like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, who had once been supporting acts to performers like Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (Sonny and Brownie were part of the 1959 Newport Folk Festival), became supporting acts to performers like Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

But they always had their audience, and there are many recordings made by the duo over the years to

prove it. They also had the good sense, borne of hardship and working class values, to know not to break up a successful act, so they remained working together for many years, although they famously did not particularly get along with each other. They worked the folk festivals, and the blues festivals, and the college gigs, and...as in the case of this live recording...the coffee houses. The Second Fret was a fond favorite of Philadelphia folk music fans up through the early 1970s, and Sonny and Brownie were always welcome there.

The two singers' repertoire was extensive, with blues written themselves (Sonny's "Me and Huddie Ledbetter") or reworked to fit them ("Brownie's "Me and Sonny," reworked from Sonny's song), or remembered from childhood, or picked up along the way. Or learned from other recordings, as with Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues," a song about refugees from a devastating flood. It has become associated with the great flood of the Mississippi Delta in 1927, and has been by blues singers who witnessed that flood, and blues singers who didn't--Terry was born in Georgia, McGhee in Tennessee. However, it was written and recorded by Bessie Smith two months before that disaster happened. It's believed to be describing an earlier flood of the Cumberland River near Nashville. Regardless, it is a devastating account of a natural disaster.

Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry at the 2nd Fret was recorded live, Kenneth S. Goldstein producing the record. It was released on Bluesville.