Gabriel Brown

A highly original country blues guitarist and singer, Gabriel Brown was discovered in Florida by folk music researchers in the '30s and launched on a recording career that lasted several decades. Although he never reached the record sales or celebrity of a Lightnin' Hopkins, the seemingly undying faith of one his producers meant that Brown at least had the chance to record prolifically. And the man's career was unusual for a blues artist, not many of whom can list experience working with director and actor Orson Welles on their resumés. Brown's first champion was the black writer Zora Neale Hurston, who spent time in Florida collecting information for her research on folklore as well as her original novels. This was where she first came in contact with Brown, who made enough of an impression on her that in 1935 she encouraged noted folk and blues collector Alan Lomax to extend a Georgia recording trip further south into Florida in order to nab some of Brown's material. The result was Brown's recording debut in a series of performances cut for the Library of Congress. Details of the man's life are a bit sketchy, gaps occurring in between these recordings and his arrival as a performer in New York City in the '40s as well as the period leading up to his death in Florida in the early '70s in a boating accident. As usual with blues artists, there are sometimes several variations on what might have happened, including him actually dying a decade earlier. Sometimes Hurston is the one who gets the credit with bringing Brown to the Big Apple to work in a light opera she'd written, but apparently the bluesman was already in the big city when he was enlisted to perform in Polk County, Hurston's attempt at setting a musical comedy inside a turpentine camp. And by this time Brown...