Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
When you think of the blues, you probably think of guitars (acoustic and electric), piano, harmonica, maybe even the bass and drums in a full band. Saxophone, on the other hand, is much more closely associated with jazz and R&B. Sax players do exist in the blues, of course, but you usually see them only in bigger, better-established groups—and despite high-profile exceptions like Eddie Shaw, who led Howlin’ Wolf’s band, they’ve often had to take gigs in other genres to maintain their careers.
Case in point: J.T. Brown, a saxophonist who not only gigged with legends such as Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James but also played with the early blues-rock configuration of Fleetwood Mac. Brown should be at least as well-known as Shaw and fellow horn man A.C. Reed, and the Secret History of Chicago Music is here to help make it happen.
John Thomas Brown was born in Mississippi on April 2, 1918, to Sam and Cecelia Rimmer Brown. Much of his early life is obscure. The first musical outfit he’s known to have joined was the long-running Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, whose roster over the decades also included Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, Louis Jordan, and Rufus Thomas—not to mention players who built audiences in Chicago, among them Big Joe Williams, Maxwell Street Jimmy, and Johnny “Daddy Stovepipe” Watson.
Black theater owner and entrepreneur Patrick Henry Chappelle formed the Rabbit’s Foot Company in Florida in 1900. He assembled five dozen or so Black performers to stage a touring musical comedy show called A Rabbit’s Foot, which traveled by rail and played theaters as well as tents. Chappelle avoided describing “the Foots” as a minstrel show, for obvious reasons. After his death in 1911, though, a white businessman from Michigan, Fred Swift Wolcott, bought the production and began marketing it that way. He moved the company’s headquarters to Port Gibson, Mississippi, in 1918, the year Brown was born. The troupe’s annual tours remained popular into the 1940s, and their last show appears to have been in 1959.
Brown traveled all over the country with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, and by historians’ best guesses he landed in Chicago in the mid-40s. A man of many nicknames, he was alternately known as Saxman Brown, J.T. “Big Boy” Brown, Bep Brown, “Nature Boy” Brown, and J.T. “Blow It” Brown.
Brown had a famously distinctive saxophone tone: “He’s the only man I know could make a horn sound like a nanny goat,” guitarist Jody Williams told Jim O’Neal (founder of Living Blues magazine) in a 1977 essay for German label Bear Family Records. Brown played on and off with pianist Little Brother Montgomery for 20 years, at clubs such as the Hollywood Rendezvous near 39th and Indiana (where Little Walter often played), the A&B Lounge at 63rd and Cottage Grove, and the White Rose in Phoenix, Illinois. They frequently sat in with guitarist J.B. Lenoir.
Brown recorded in Chicago with Roosevelt Sykes and St. Louis Jimmy Oden in 1945, and as far as I can tell, that session was his first—though I can’t be super confident about discographical information more than 70 years old for an artist who used at least half a dozen names. Brown’s raw saxophone stylings also graced late-40s sides by Washboard Sam and Memphis Jimmy Clark.
In 1947, Brown led a five-piece billed as “J.T. Brown’s Boogie Band” that backed Little Eddie Boyd on the 78 rpm platter “I Had to Let Her Go” b/w “Kilroy Won’t Be Back.” A different group called “Brown’s Blu-Blowers” supported Corporal Booker T. Washington on the 1949 single “St. Louis Boogie” b/w “Good Whiskey.” That same year, Brown’s Blues Blowers played behind Grant Jones on the Apex release “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water (And Sleep in a Hollow Log)” b/w “When the Deal Goes Down.”
Brown’s first session as a bandleader was in 1949, also for Apex: “Blackjack Blues” b/w “Brown’s Boogie” is credited to J.T. Brown & His Blu-Blowers. The O’Neal essay for Bear Family says Brown’s first session was in 1950 for Harlem Records, but Apex was affiliated with Harlem and the single came out on both labels—it seems likely that later year is just wrong.
In 1951, Brown was signed to the brand-new United Records as Nature Boy Brown & His Blues Ramblers, and his first of three 78s for the label featured the local anthem “Windy City Boogie.” The instrumental jump-blues release did well enough that Brown put together a touring band that included trumpeter King Kolax. “J.T. and I worked together about five or six months,” Kolax told O’Neal. “We went to LaSalle, IL, Louisville, Montgomery, AL. It was Brown, myself, Art Tarry on piano, Hillard Brown on drums and Ernest Ashley on guitar, and he picked up a bass player out of Chattanooga at Harry Brown’s place on East 9th Street. J.T. had an act and he could draw a crowd.”
That Chattanooga bass player was Tommy Braden, also lead singer for R&B act the Four Blazes, who had a hit for Chicago’s Delmark Records in 1952 with the saucy “Mary Jo.” That same year, Brown jumped to the Meteor and J.O.B labels, cutting jumping tunes such as “Round House Boogie” and “Boogie Baby” under his own name and as Bep Brown.
The early 50s were arguably the peak of Brown’s career. He continued to gig constantly in Chicago clubs and tour whenever he could, but he never got comfortable enough that he didn’t have to worry about money. In Jody Williams’s interview with O’Neal, the guitarist recalled accompanying Brown on a tour supporting a popular California vocal group called Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, whose leader and guitarist likely influenced Chuck Berry with his rhythmic playing. Williams said Brown threatened Moore with a beating on that tour, accusing him of withholding $100 from Brown’s group after a show at the armory in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Unfortunately, Brown didn’t always fight for his sidemen. Williams also said that at a gig in Saint Louis, Brown told his band that they’d had their pay cut because the club was having a slow week. The musicians didn’t buy this excuse, so Brown agreed to pay them in full—but then he snuck back to Chicago with the cash and left them stranded.
J.T. Brown plays in the six-piece band on Howlin’ Wolf’s 1962 recording of “Do the Do.”
Williams accompanied Brown for his final United Records session in 1956, cutting a demo of a doo-wop song called “Darling Patricia” that label head Leonard Allen wanted for Saint Louis singer Artie Wilkins; Wilkins released it that year on United subsidiary label States.
The great majority of Brown’s recordings were as a sideman, not as a leader. He played on a 1952 session (released in ’54) with slide guitarist Elmore James and his Broomdusters where they recorded two of Brown’s songs, including a version of “Dumb Woman Blues” with Brown on vocals. He blew his sax on several singles for Howlin’ Wolf in 1962 and ’63, including the savage “Do the Do.” (He had three credits on the essential Wolf singles compilation that dropped in 1965, The Real Folk Blues.) Perhaps most famously, Brown played tenor saxophone and clarinet on Muddy Waters’s seminal 1964 album Folk Singer, where the sidemen also included Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy.
This single that J.T. Brown recorded in 1952 with Elmore James shows off the horn man’s tone and style.
In 1969 Brown played on several cuts of the crossover project that Fleetwood Mac recorded at Chess Records with Chicago blues artists they admired. It’s been released under a few names (Fleetwood Mac in Chicago, Blues Jam at Chess, Blues Jam in Chicago), and its stellar lineup also features Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Big Walter Horton, Buddy Guy, and Honeyboy Edwards.
At this point Fleetwood Mac were still a blues-rock group—they were years away from hiring Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—and the place they afforded Brown among the city’s blues royalty reflects what I’ve always thought his stature should be. He even sang a tune of his own, “Blackjack Blues,” on the UK band’s double album.
Sadly, Brown died that same year on November 24, 1969, felled at age 51 by a failed lung surgery at Michael Reese Hospital in Bronzeville.
J.T. Brown sang and played tenor sax on his own tune “Blackjack Blues” (styled “Black Jack”) for the 1969 double album that Fleetwood Mac recorded in Chicago with a group of Chicago blues artists.
Brown was buried at Burr Oak Cemetery in Worth, Illinois, without even a proper headstone. This shameful omission was rectified in 2011. The fourth annual White Lake Blues Festival in Whitehall, Michigan, organized by nonprofit organization Killer Blues, raised enough money to give Brown a headstone in June of that year.
Muddy Waters’s son Mud Morganfield nodded to Brown’s legacy by opening his 2012 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son with a version of Brown’s “Short Dressed Woman.” Perhaps more important, compilations of Brown’s work have been appearing since 1977, when Delmark released the retrospective Windy City Boogie via its Pearl imprint, which it had acquired in 1974. (Delmark is still kicking, and the record is still in print.) As recently as 2005, The Chronological J.T. Brown: 1950-1954 arrived on the French label Classics.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.