“Charles Brown’s Story and Stories”
By Dr. Barry Lee Pearson
July 4, 1994 – Dayton, Ohio
My grandmother told me: “If you learn to play music one day, you won’t have to get up early in the morning and go to work at 8 o’clock.”
She’d take me down to the wharf and we’d watch those guys on those ships and salt boats, and the sugar boats and the sulphur boats.
She’d say: “Now, you see how they’re working and sweating and all that stuff. And they ain’t making no money. Say, what if you get your education and learn the music too. Say, you could go work four hours a night and make some money.” And that stayed in my mind.
I was always aware of music because my grandmother was a choir director and she played the piano. I call her mama because my mother had died earlier and she took the place of my Mother. She wanted me to be a certain way, teach school and play the piano for the church or for the school and you know usually the teacher had to play at that time. But my uncle named James Simpson was a very devout fan of records at the time, and he was her son, which was my mother’s brother. So he would go out and buy these records by Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. So we had this old big tall Victrola that you wind up with the big open front, and I think the speaker came out of the front of it. Looked like a big old chifferobe or something. But, anyway, he would do this for us to listen to when my grandmother was gone behind her back. She didn’t want us to hear these things. We had a roll piano too. And my uncle Johnny didn’t ever know anything about music but he was very smart. He learned to play the piano, by the roll piano, by slowing it down.
So then my uncle Johnny, which was my great uncle, my grandmother’s brother, played the guitar very beautifully and he played a lot of the clubs, what they called twenty dollars a night on Friday nights. That was good money then, and Saturday night. But he would come over and he saw that, that Grandma, his sister, was interested in giving us music. And he said, “You got to learn to play like this.” So he’d get on the roll piano and pump it and put us between his legs and try to pump the piano, say: “Look at those keys, boy, you got to learn that. Don’t that sound good to you?”
I say: “Yeah.”
Say: “You got to learn to play like that.
But the interest for the piano came just by looking at it. And I said, “If I could learn to play like that I’d be so happy.”
In Texas City t hey had a little place on Sixth Street, little honky tonks and they had little hotels with the music playing downstairs, but . . .
I slipped out to one to listen, me and my little cousin went. My grandmother went to church on a Friday night to the choir rehearsal or whatever and we’d go over there and listen when they thought we were in the beds. We were putting our ears to this and that’s when I heard this lilting melody, “Well, I’m drifting, walking and drifting like a ship.” I heard this melody. I couldn’t put it together but it sound so good that I tried to get back on the piano and imitate that. And that’s how “Drifting Blues” came.
And then my grandmother had another daughter named Annie Mae. She turned out to be a schoolteacher. Well, she was learning to play the piano too, and she was older than we were. So we would watch her play and she was playing pretty good. grandmother said: “Now, boy you all got to learn to play like she does.”
So then later on as I grew up to be I guess about 10 years old, I was really aware of music. My grandmother in the early days had tried to take me to a music teacher when I was 6 years old. But the teacher started hitting my knuckles – that’s Miss Jones – and I didn’t like it.
So my grandmother said: “What do you think about Miss Jones?”
I said, “Mama, I don’t like her because she hit my knuckles.”
So then she said: “Well, I’m gonna teach you what I know.” She said, “But all those notes with that flags on it,” she says, “I don’t want to be bothered with those. Now, you’ll have to go to a teacher for that.”
She took me to one of the churches, preacher’s singing. A Reverend Cole. And he had a piano player named Janice Felder, a young girl that could really play a piano. And she was from Galveston, Texas.
So she said: “I want you to go hear this girl named Janice Felder play.”
And so I went to this. church in Dickerson, Texas, which was about 20 miles from Texas City, where I was born. So she took me to this church and I saw this girl playing for this Reverend Cole. This man sang church songs like the blues. He had the sisters shouting and carrying on. And so I heard this piano that this woman was playing. She was a young girl, and she was jazzing up those church songs.
Grandma said, “You got to learn to play like her, because I can’t play like that.”
She say: “You know what I’m gonna ask her will she teach you.”
So she did go and ask Janice Felder would she like to take a student up. She say: “Well, you bring him over to Galveston and I’ll see what he does and I’ll tell you whether I can teach him or not.”
So my grandmother made it her business to take me over there. And I sit at the piano, well I did know how to play a little, a few little chords and little church songs like “Old Rugged Cross.” She said: “Oh, yes, I’ll teach him. That will be five dollars a lesson.”
But in the meantime, in the course of that two years I had a chance to listen to the radio. So we had this little radio that played just so loud. And we turned that thing up just to hear what’s going on.
My grandmother, she loved Fats Waller, because her daughter had a what they call a “Honky Tok” place where the girls would dance to the juke box playing. They put a nickel in. They had the Ink Spots at that time. Who else Andy Kirk, a lot of the big bands, they were popular in the ‘30s. So we’d listen to that on the juke boxes. And she was crazy about Fats Waller, she’d say. But then every day around about 12:00 I’d go in there and this guy would come on playing the piano – Art Tatum. From Toledo, I think. But anyway, I heard this beautiful piano. And then I said, “Oh, now that guy plays good.” When I heard this Art Tatum play, I wanted my grandmother to hear this because she hadn’t heard Art Tatum. She was always talking about Fats Waller and his left hand and this stride piano. But I was aware of that. But I said: “Mama, you should listen to this man coming on midday from somewhere. And it’s Art Tatum. So when I take and play this piano and she listen on, I say, “Mama, how do you like that?” Because I think he played 15 minutes, she say: “Oh, he plays beautiful but he plays too many runs for me.” She says: “I like that stride thing that Fats Waller does.”
So she’d slip over to Galveston, Texas when I started taking music lessons and she was gonna try to teach me some of the songs like “Cross Patch, Honey Suckle Rose.”
She said, “But there’s to much sharps and flats for me.”
She said, “Ill take it to your teacher so when Janie Felder took me I became more aware of music because I was a little ahead of things, even though I couldn’t play them. But my mind was there.
So she showed me how to read those notes and how to put them together. And that helped me quite a bit.
So I started reading a lot of the popular standard pieces of music that my grandmother would buy. But she said: “Don’t let those folks in the church know we bought those kinds of records. Don’t you tell nobody.” Because she didn’t want the church people to know that she was ahead. But my grandmother was way ahead of them because, she, she was the choir director and she had the rhythm. She could play fast and she could pat her foot a certain way that I could never do. One foot go up, another one go down like that. And I’d watch her and she’d do this and play ,like al these good things that she could play.
And then her brother was down at 60 miles at another church in Warden, Texas. He played thie piano and taught themselves. So when the associations came and I got my experience, even at 12 years old, I was able to play for the Twentieth Century Association at a Baptist convention. And when I did that, my uncle had me down and they paid me $20, which I thought was a lot of money.
And that was an experience, because I used to jazz up those church songs. I’d play the blues behind the song. So when Reverend Keller, who was U.S. Keeler, had a contest between the choirs, who was in the association of the Baptist convention, you had to take your choir and be judged. I had my choir together and I had my aunt and them singing and they could sing. My cousin Maria, she had a voice that could sing over three or four thousand without a microphone. And when we went to Beaumont, Texas, we beat all those choirs. When I led a march and I played this piano because there wasn’t nobody playing piano like me. They were playing a little tromp tromp, but I was jazzing it because my music teacher had taught me. I tried to watch her, how she played, so I jazzed up all the church songs. I mean, I just wanted to sound good. I didn’t know about, well the devil’s music like they say. I just – well, it was the sound that I wanted to hear after listening to Art Tatum and all them. I wanted that to be in to the church work too. Because actually I never knew that I would ever be into what I call playing popular music. I mean as a career.
There were some sisters in that church say, “Oh, he’s playing the blues in this church.” But the majority, to see a young boy playing that good was really for me. To find out, because I was taking my grandmother’s place who was playing straight. And then in an answer when we went to the association an won the first prize for being the best choir then they kind of went for me.
But that, they approved that later on because all the people started to try to jazz up the church songs. But they didn’t have the experience that I had because what I listened to was quite different from what they were listening to. They didn’t have Art Tatum in their mind.
So we were young and wanted to hear blues and boogie, but she was in the church. We were learning how to play boogie. When my grandmother would go away from the choir rehearsals we were trying to play boogie. And say, “Watch and see if Mama’s coming.” Play boogie say, “We like that” and so we were trying it and they would come back we’d get right back on the church songs, “On a hill far away.”
“That boy sure is doing good on that piano. But see they didn’t know we were trying to learn jazz and play boogie woogie.
I remember one time Chick Webb’s band came to Galveston, Texas, to the auditorium. I wanted to go. So all the other kids were going. They wanted ot hear this Tisket a Tasket, Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb. They want to hear this crap. So I told my grandmother, I say: “Mama, I want to go see Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb when they play there Friday night.” She says: “You can’t go, because I don’t allow you to go to anything like that.” Because they church sisters, you know. I say, “Mama, I am going to hear Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb.” I went. I saw Chick Webb play his drums, Ella Fitzgerald . . .
So when I went home that night, my grandmother was waiting for me. She had plaited three cedar switches together and soaked them in this big old aluminum tub . . . She had soaked these three cedar switches that she put together. And when I walked in she said: “Take off. Say you grown huh?”
I said, “Mama, what you gonna do?”
“Take off those clothes.
I mean, I’m 16 years old and I was pretty big. But she was big too. I knew not to fight her. I said I got to take this beating. I saw Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb. She whipped me until t he welts – blood was on the top of those welts with a whip. “I’m gonna teach you a lesson. If you think your grown.”
But I wouldn’t cry. I took because I did see what I wanted.
They had juke boxes and dancing so it wasn’t no honkytonks where people played guitars. You find may be one guy playing a little party. Like my uncle Johnny he played for a lot of rent parties. Ivory Joe Hunter would come from Houston and play.
Rent parties, everybody made a contribution that this person did something to pay the rent. Whether they could pay the rent or not. You would just, they call it “rent parties” – see, in other words, if I didn’t have enough money see everybody make a contribution and then we pay the musician who’s playing the guitar. And everybody contributes maybe a couple of dollars, a dollar or two. And maybe they might have 40 people there that night. And a dollar was a lot of money, considerate. So when you went to one of those, people who wanted to dance and listen, they paid that dollar. And if they had 40 people, $40 was a lot of money.
But it gave me an experience which I really liked because Janice Felder, that girl, if I could ever play like that. But the misfortune was when she left to go back to college. She had won every contest in Texas playing classical piano. And she’d go back to Bishop College, which was in Marshall, Texas, and she left me with her teacher, which was Miss Cora Gamble. Miss Cora Gamble was a big fat lady, light, she looked like an Italian woman, and she was really up on that music and could sing. She was an Episcopalian. She played for the church. She played the organ and the piano too. And she was a great teacher too. And so I sort of advanced, the little piano that I did up through ten trades of piano. I finished ten grades of piano with her.
Well, I had technique when I went to Galveston, to stay to play to go to school because Texas City had a junior high school. I had to spend my early years in Galveston. So when I went over there, I stayed with the music teacher and her husband. Cora Gamble and Lee Gamble.
Then when I got over there, Mr. James, who was over in the Physics Department, he saw that I could play and read real well. And he said:
“You know, you play real nice. We have some engagements out here now, would you like to play with us and read the stock. Because I couldn’t solo.” I didn’t know nothing about that. I could read what was up there because they’d have a little sign, “Solo piano.” So I started playing out on the beach, in West Beach, in a lot of little white clubs with him. Songs like “Vini Vini Vini,” was popular then. Oh, they had “Big John’s Special,” anything danceable, a lot of waltzes. “You’re the one Rose that’s left in my Heart” – a lot of thing is that Bing Crosby was singing. So we learned to play that. Because a lot of those places were Italian oriented and we played what they wanted. And the “Beer Barrel Polka.” And so that helped me quite a bit.
When we had our first date in Houston at t he Downtown Grill for the college, after the college football game in Houston, they had a big dance and the college band played, Prairie Collegiate. So I was in the band. So we – Mama to come up. So she wanted to see what her little boy was doing and I never will forget they brought my grandmother up there. And she would sit there looking at me play and it really give me all the consolation in the world. And she was telling my aunt, that was her daughter, “Look at that boy.”
And I never will forget. She bought a great big delicious red apple and walked over there and put it on the piano. And I never forgot that and she bragged on me and said, “You all had a chance to try to do something but you wouldn’t do it” – said “But we gonna try to put him over.” So that stayed with me.
Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene.