Charles Brown - Biography
By Jonny Whiteside
Pianist-singer Charles Brown was an essential, deeply influential force in postwar R&B, one whose singularly sophisticated approach gave him a distinctive and instantly recognizable sound. While most rhythm & blues stars excelled in hot, raunchy lyrics, propelled by a driving, primitive cadence and wailing, funky saxophones, Brown was a study in balladeer cool, a performer whose style was fraught with spiritual grace and passionate emotion, qualities that deftly underscored the often profound melancholy of his lyrics, which more often than not were focused on beauty and kindness. Brown pioneered the unusually smooth musical sub genre variously tagged as "the West Coast blues fusion," "cool blues" and “cocktail blues.”
Born September 13, 1922 in Texas City, Texas, Brown was always a rarity: he was one of the very few university-educated blues men, traveling to California as young man, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at UC Berkeley. After a brief stint as teacher, Brown turned to music in 1943. He first made his mark in Los Angeles as pianist with guitarist Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, an outfit that modeled itself after the Nat Cole Trio. After the Three Blazers recorded his “Drifting Blues" (which Brown had written at age fourteen, and which went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming Cashbox's top R&B record of 1946), Brown soon emerged as the band’s driving force and main draw. When he split from Moore several years later, it was a rancorous mess, and he had to re-establish himself as a solo performer, but his unique vocal style made that a simple task. As his longtime accompanist Clifford Solomon put it, "Everybody knew who Charles Brown was--every school kid used to romance on his stuff. I think when ‘Drifting Blues’ came out, the birthrate shot up 90 percent!"
Brown's subsequent succession of postwar hits--among them “Trouble Blues," a number one R&B hit in 1949, and the haunting Korean war-themed "Black Night," a 1951 number one R&B hit--were some of the day's most finely wrought rhythm & blues. 1949's "Merry Christmas, Baby" became a perennial after it went to No. 9 on the R&B charts and was subsequently reissued the following year and again in 1954--every December, you'll still find it on jukeboxes in black neighborhoods across the country. The song has also been recorded numerous times, by the likes of Chuck Berry, Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen.
As a blues singer, Brown conveyed a sense of abject desolation; he was an inconsolable everyman who cut to the very heart of that most common life experience: misery. As a balladeer, he was a model of delicacy and restraint, one whose understated interpretations communicated as much through the unsaid as through the direct lyric itself. Brown's exaggerated, whispery style was a mix of raw blues and white torch song, yet he was uncomfortable wearing the "blues singer" tag: "I consider myself to be a variety artist," Brown said. "People think a blues singer is someone in overalls and a straw hat, but, man, we were sharp--wore silk suits, changed clothes three times a night."
The blues ballad aesthetic, famously proposed by Leroy Carr's 1928 "How Long How Long Blues," found its most successful proponent in Brown, and he enjoyed great success with it. He also directly influenced several generations of R&B performers, from Floyd Dixon and Ray Charles to Sam Cooke; Cooke's 1960 "Bring It On Home to Me" is a direct extension of Brown's 1959 "I Want To Go Home." His impact was far-reaching: Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun cited Brown's "Drifting Blues" as one of the songs that led him to the business, and the fledgling songwriting team of Lieber and Stoller got their first hit when Brown cut their "Hard Times" in 1952.
Riding high through the R&B heyday on national package tours and headlining his own club dates, Brown's career cooled in the rock & roll era, and by 1960 he found himself trapped in a seemingly endless job at a mob-owned joint in the gambling town of Newport, Kentucky. The management outwardly adored Brown and presented him with a brand-new Cadillac, but every time he tried to quit, they offered to park it--and him--at the bottom of the nearby Ohio River. Although 1961's "Please Come Home for Christmas" was a big seller, he struggled through out the 1960s. By the '70s, he was only sporadically recording, still capable of fine albums like Music Maestro Please (1978 Big Town) but seemingly concentrating on playing, over and over, the same set with the same creaky between-song patter in the same old nightclubs.
By the mid-'80s, however, Brown had rekindled the flame and begun to turn in live shows of amazing power, often performing two-hour-plus sets that displayed the true reach of vast repertoire. His superb One More for the Road (1986 Blue Side) signaled the start of a career rejuvenation. Significantly, the album was licensed and re-issued by Alligator in 1989, and the great saxophonist Clifford Solomon rejoined him in 1990 just before Bonnie Raitt took Brown on the road as her opening act on a high-profile national tour. She also lovingly introduced him at each stop on the way to ensure that her audiences paid Brown due attention. For Brown, it was the start of a fabulous new era--following that Raitt outing, he drew SRO crowds across the country and was finally making some real money.
After a long, illustrious career, he achieved what very few of his peers ever did--Brown actually bested himself, striving for and consistently reaching a higher artistic standard. Throughout the 1990s, he cut a series of stunningly perfect albums, like All My Life (1990 Bullseye Blues), that completely outstripped his classic late-'40s early-'50s recordings. Laden with atmosphere, emotionally charged yet never florid, each was a masterpiece of low-key expression. It was a glorious return, yet ultimately, all he really cared about was playing the piano and playing the ponies and until 1998, when his health began to deteriorate, he was able to do both as often as he wished. Charles Brown died of congestive heart failure in an Oakland, California hospital on January 21, 1999 and was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on March 15 of that same year.