Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 20. 29th August 1973

"Its all just music to me"

page 16

"Its all just music to me"

Photo of Sonny Terry (mouth-harp) and Brownie McGhee (guitar)

Sonny Terry (mouth-harp) and Brownie McGhee (guitar)

Interview

Salient: The traditional route for black entertainers has been through church music and spirituals. Did you follow that route?

Brownie: I did play in the church. I played both blues and spirituals. Its the same thing. If I wanted to play spirituals now you understand I wouldn't have to sit down and rearrange anything. The relationship between blues and spirituals is very close. Its only in the different story they tell that gets some people confused. Spirituals is about imagination, see? Its not about what's going on here. That's the blues.

Salient: I brought it up because some people have reacted very negatively to say, Ray Charles rewriting a spiritual to make "I Got A Woman".

Brownie: No, I don't think so, nothing in music should be kept apart as long as its musical. Other people have differentiated black music because that's been in line with what they've wanted to teach us; that you've got to go to heaven to get the good things in life. Black people were told "you can't enjoy yourself here". So my blues and my spirituals have got no bearing on my life. By that I mean I'll get drunk and sing spirituals just as quick as I'll sing the blues. Its all just music to me, that's all.

Salient: Sonny, you started playing blues on the street right? Is this anything like the English busking? Would you have a regular position in downtown Raleigh where you'd set up to play?

Sonny: Yeah, we used to go down to Raleigh, go Friday, Saturday and play; we'd make enough to take care of rent and everything. We'd just start to play and some fellow would stop, then another would stop, pretty soon you get a crowd, they'd pass the hat round, nickles and dimes. We'd play for a quarter nothing less. Someone give a nickel, someone else a dime I'd say "hey, ten more cents man and you're gonna get a song'. Yeah, that's how it goes like that.

Salient: Are people still doing this?

Sonny: Sure, it still goes on, but they don't do too much now in New York. Me and Brownie used to do it in New York City, up there in Harlem. But it got a little tough, dope, you know, got too strong. No one is playing on the street now, you are likely to get a brick alongside your head now.

Salient: People tend to romanticise the blues, say you've got to be suffering to play blues. They forget that you need to have a little room from all that suffering in order to create.

Brownie: Right. If you're living on the street you got to play what people want, not what you want to play.

Salient: In the folk revival you and Brownie were the first big names in blues to make the college circuit. Do you think it was your style that was more......

Sonny: No, no we ain't changed our style. We just were in the right place, knew the right people.

Brownie: We've got something that sells. We've never had a million seller, never even an extraordinary seller but its something that sells regularly. People pay a lot of money for our old records why, I don't know, but......

Salient: Do you still sell to a black audience?

Brownie: We sell to everybody. I hope. I mean I hope we still sell to blacks.

Salient: I wondered, because 30 years ago people might listen to blues, or play blues, now do they just go home and put on the latest Motown record?

Brownie: Thirty years ago only black people bought black records because they were the only ones interested. I don't know why things like that change. Thirty-five cents a copy they we[unclear: re] then. You want to buy our records now you got to pay a lot more. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Salient: Brownie, you've said that playing blues means living them, and that this meant whiskey, women and....

Brownie: And money. And if it aint whiskey its the penitentiary or travel. But mostly, lord knows, its women.

Salient: White singers you've performed with, people like Seeger and Guthrie went through a kind of white blues experience as okies in the dustbowl and union struggles. Yet they expressed their "blues" much more frequently in political terms. Have you ever wanted to put your political views more directly into your music?

Sonny: Explain this good to me. You mean do I want to play just for blacks, not for whites, or for whites, not for blacks? What do you mean?

Salient: No. I mean have you ever wanted to express your political views in your songs in the same way Guthrie did in his? Or in the way Leadbelly did?

Sonny: Well 'Belly did folk songs, not too many blues. But lord he caught hell for doing what he did.

Brownie: In a lot of my songs you find a lot of political lines, but they're not there to knock people in the mouth with. I do know, though, what is going on. But when you write that sort of song you set yourself up. People think you're trying to give an answer to the problem in America which is between black and white. Mine never did, no song would make much impression on that problem. That's something black and white got to work out between themselves.

Photo of Brownie McGhee

Biography

Saunders Terrel (Sonny Terry) was born in Greensboro, Georgia, in October 1911. At the age of 11 he was blinded in one eye in a children's game and later he lost the sight of his other eye when a piece of iron was thrown at his face. His blindness stimulated his study of the harmonica which he had been 'fooling around with' since early childhood.

He teamed up with Blind Gary Davis and they played on the streets of the tobacco towns together. Later Sonny met Blind Boy Fuller with whom he became close friends. All three blind musicians played together for some time on the streets of Durham and Raleigh led by a local albino named George Washington who played guitar and washboard. The mayor of the town acted as their manager and arranged their first recording dates with the Vocation company in the late 'thirties.

Washington met up with Brownie McGhee son of a farmer and 'wheeler'. Brownie was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1914. He learned his first tunes on a banjo made from a marshmallow tin. At the age of four he was afflicted with polio which permanently affected the growth of his right leg. As he was unable to do normal field work he played guitar for vacation resorts in the Smoky Mountains until he joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Like many other singers at the time he travelled with 'doctor' shows and with the Mighty Haag Carnival, playing roadhouses and jukes, 'runnin', 'wild'.

It was while travelling that Brownie was introduced to Sonny Terry, Blind Boy Fuller and co. McGhee formed a band of six members, including Sonny on harmonica.

Sonny travelled to New York where he landed a part in 'Finian's Rainbow', Brownie later joined him and shared a small spot in Tennessee William's 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. Since then the two have almost become legendary figures of the blues as a duo, although they insist that they are still individual artists.

Photo of Saunders Terrel