Artist: Cleo Brown
Genre(s):
Blues
Discography:
Collection (Boogie Woogie)
Year:
Tracks: 1
The isaac Merrit Singer Cleo Brown, known in by and by age as C. Patra Brown, made recordings in the '30s and '40s, then entered the studios once once more in the recent '80s after being rediscovered living in the hinterlands of Colorado. Judging from the titles of digest albums she appears on, Brown seems like she'd be a set of fun, lumped in a class with other glossy chicks, hot mamas, queens of boogie-woogie, female jivers, and rockin' pianoforte ladies. Even amongst this equal radical, Brown had some particularly endearing characteristics, specially in her selection of material. Reefer songs ar a dime bag a xII simply how many tributes to egotistical feet hold been recorded? Her "Breakin' in a New Pair of Shoes" is a linkup with the great Fats Waller, with whom she was ofttimes compared. He recorded "Your Feet's Too Big," his possess tribute to feet, grown if not conceited. Another of Brown's superlative and most strange songs is "When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan," celebrating black performers in the picture business.
Innate into a musical menage in Mississippi, she started vocalizing in her father's church service as a fry. Following the menage move to Chicago in 1919, she began formal studies music on pianoforte. By the early '20s, she was working professionally in clubs and tent shows as well as broadcasting live with her have steady radio show. By the early '30s, she was well-established and for the future iI decades she worked about round-the-clock, playacting in cities across the United States and property forth regularly in clubs such as New York's Three Deuces. Opinions vary widely as to her talents, but at that place is no question that she was a great communicator. In fact, some listeners may winding up want they had a more personal relationship with Brown one time they have heard such personal messages as "Mommy Don't Want No Peas and Rice and Coconut Oil," or better yet "The Stuff Is Here and It's Mellow." On the strength of the latter numeral, originally cut in 1935 for Decca, Brown was ceremonially welcomed into the frat of "artists world Health Organization feature recorded songs about marijuana cigarette," significance that her medicine is available on a diversity of compilations collecting such material.
There were deuce sides to her musical performances: her voice and her piano performing. As for the late, the antecedently mentioned range of judgement veers from those wHO line her as a "female Fats Waller," which unquestionably should be taken as a compliment unless unitary is describing taste in vesture; to the other end of the spectrum, in which Brown is considered to have a "lilliputian and prim" voice that gets across wholly on the effectiveness of her personality. As for the keyboard, she is more than evenly comprehended in this regard, considered along with players such as Freddie Slack and Bob Zurke as the to the highest degree prominent of the endorsement generation of boogie-woogie players. "It's coming with us to that Desert Island," one critic said of a Cleo Brown performance; piece another writer, singling knocked out her efforts from amongst the prominent cast of a four-CD set, wrote "Cleo Brown was an absolute divine revelation on "Lookie Lookie Lookie (Hither Comes Cookie)," her pianoforte chops easy the match of her sly vocals." The influences of the major players from the original boogie rage canful be heard in her playing, of course, including Pinetop Smith, whose art object "Pinetop's Boogie" she recorded, as advantageously as Albert Ammons, Jimmy Yancey, Joe Sullivan, Clarence Lofton, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis. Some malarkey writers too hand out some of the mention for the popularity of her records to her accompanists, which included leading jazzmen of the sidereal day.
By the later '40s, the tough content of her music was beginning to inconvenience oneself her. Brown was leaving through a religious experience that made singing about the usual loud classic megrims themes a bit unsettling. She retired from music in 1953 and took up nursing. This was a passing calling, wandering up in a decision to return to music, simply only of the religious variety show. It was piano player Marion McPartland, a fine histrion as well as the host of the rattling National Public Radio show Piano Jazz, that came upon Brown living in the Denver, CO, country under not practically of a professional limelight. She was persuaded to visit New York in order to tape an appearance for Piano Jazz, resulting in a superb clause on her by jazz writer Whitney Balliett, eventually reprinted in his book American Singers. A new muckle of recordings and performances followed, the final chapters of a legend that had gone from the lore of the viper to the gospels, and back once more. Although hippies no uncertainty wish soul a bit less of a square had get along up with the vocal, Dave Brubeck's "Sweet Cleo Brown" is a charming testimonial.
