The Music Library

composers, performers, music

Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies

Bob Dunn’s first session with the Brownies

Recorded January 27, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois, for Decca Records. Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, with Bob Dunn on amplified electric steel guitar.

Bob Dunn had built his own pickup, reportedly modeled on a contraption he had encountered on the Coney Island boardwalk and followed to New Orleans to study. What he played through it was trombone-like, full of bent tones and harmonic substitutions that pointed twenty years forward to the moment when amplified guitars would become the standard sound of American popular music. The session is documented as the first commercial recording to feature an electrically amplified instrument.

CITED IN · MILTON BROWN: THE FOUNDER-TO-BE · LEON MCAULIFFE AND THE STEEL GUITAR

St. Louis Blues

Composed by W. C. Handy, 1914.

Recorded March 1936 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, for Decca Records, during the sessions at which the Brownies cut forty-nine songs in three days. Milton Brown, vocal.

Handy’s blues had been a standard for two decades by the time Brown took it to New Orleans. The Brownies compressed a fifteen-minute live arrangement into a three-and-a-half-minute side and held the form together at full intensity throughout. The recording is the best surviving evidence of how the band sounded in the final weeks of its working life.

CITED IN · MILTON BROWN: THE FOUNDER-TO-BE

Avalon

Recorded approximately February 1936 for Decca Records. Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies.

Two months after Brown recorded “Avalon,” his car struck a telephone pole on the Jacksboro Highway directly across from the Avalon Motel. He survived the crash and died of pneumonia five days later. The recording is a working dance number from a band at the height of its powers. The coincidence of the location is the kind of detail the historical record cannot resolve and cannot stop noting.

CITED IN · MILTON BROWN: THE FOUNDER-TO-BE