Biography
Smoky Babe (Robert Brown) was born in 1927 in Itta Bena, Mississippi, a farming area some fifty miles from Clarksdale, the country blues capital of the world. His background consists of the stuff of which country blues singers are madea few months of school, early years as a sharecropper on a plantation raising cotton, corn, and garden vegetables, frequent moves to other plantations when the crops petered out or he "didn't get paid right," a spell in city slums while working on a "hot truck" (a carrier of hot steel) in the mill at Bessemer, Alabama, while at the same time in the evenings he worked gigs in Black night clubs where he played for dimes, quarters, and half dollars dancers tossed to the stage. These recordings were made in 1960 by Harry Oster in Scotlandville, La., and were previously issued on Folklyric LP 118 and Arhoolie LP 2019.
Herman E. Johnson of Scotlandville, Louisiana, summed up in eloquent words what had been the formative roots of most gifted blues singers: "I had a good religious mother, a good religious father; they both was members of the Baptist Church. I have one brother an' one sister, an' they is members of the Baptist Church, an' apparently I was the on`iest jack (maverick) of the family. I don't belong to any church. So my life was just that way, to keep out of trouble, drink my little whiskey, an' go an' do little ugly things like that, but just in a cue-tee (quiet) way. An' in 19 an' 27 I taken up the habit of playin' the guitar, an' I imagine it must have been the good Lord give me the talent to compose things."
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These recordings were made in 1961 by Harry Oster in Baton Rouge, La., and were previously issued on Arhoolie LP 1060.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.