McGhee, Walter Brown

▪ 1997

      ("BROWNIE"), U.S. blues musician (b. Nov. 30, 1915, Knoxville, Tenn.—d. Feb. 16, 1996, Oakland, Calif.), brought the lively finger-picking style of blues that originated in the rural Piedmont region of the Carolinas to a young, largely white, urban audience, particularly in his longtime partnership with the blind harmonica player Sonny Terry. McGhee learned guitar as a boy from his musician father and traveled through the South as an itinerant bluesman or with gospel shows and carnivals. In the early 1940s he settled in New York City, where he and Terry performed with other bluesmen, notably Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), and with folk singers, including Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. By the 1960s McGhee and Terry were among the most popular folk-blues acts. Separately and together, they toured extensively, recorded numerous albums, and appeared on Broadway in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955-57) and Langston Hughes's Simply Heaven (1957). McGhee also owned and operated the Home of the Blues Music School in Harlem in the 1940s and recorded several motion picture sound tracks. The partnership gradually crumbled in the late 1970s, and McGhee retired after Terry's death in 1986.

* * *