RICHARD " RABBIT " BROWN

                                           

                                             

In 1900 they were everywhere. Singing on street corners, in front of circus entrances, or just moving down the dusty roads of the South, playing anywhere a crowd might be cajoled into donating a dime to the cause. To survive they played any request--ballads, popular tunes, white hillbilly music, hymns, and the newly emerged blues. Songsters were the first folk musicians to be "professional." Southern social occasions required a wide variety of music and the songsters strived to fill the need. Essential was the ability to provide a steady dance beat, but on the street corner a sentimental number could bring forth both tears and coins. By the 1930's, however, the songster was becoming a thing of the past, nudged out by an expanding national entertainment industry that reached into the deepest parts of the South. Most songsters faded into the past. A few waxed recordings, leaving a tempting glance into their world--and many questions.

Such is the case with Richard "Rabbit" Brown, one of the most celebrated songsters and the only one from new Orleans to record. On March 11, 1927, Brown cut six sides for the recording pioneer Ralph Peer. An interesting mix of original blues, pop covers and "event" songs, this brief catalog represents all that is known for certain about him. Where was he born? Where did he die? How did he learn to play? Why did the few fellow musicians who recall him remember him as a "clown man" who sang "all the funny kind of songs--made up songs"?1

In 1927 Richard "Rabbit" Brown was already at least middle aged. He was probably born around 1880, just as the first rumblings of Jim Crow moved across the South as the Federal army went home. The place of his birth remains a mystery. New Orleans usually receives the honor, but doubts cloud the issue. Local bluesman Ernie Vincent remarked on hearing the recording that Brown sounded like he came from north Louisiana or perhaps Mississippi. Indeed, Brown's vocal and phrasing does show hints of a rural origin, particularly if he is compared to singers like Joe Harris and Kid West, who hailed from new Iberia and had lived near Bunkie for a while.2 Then there is Brown's testimony in "James Alley Blues": "Cause I was born in the country, she thinks I'm easy to rule." Brown sings the line with a conviction that seems to indicate that his woman did think he did come from the country. A rural origin for Brown also fits the general pattern of migration of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century. Thousands moved to the city to escape sharecropping and festering racial tension which exploded at the turn of the century. Even if Brown was not born in rural Louisiana, his parents probably migrated into New Orleans shortly before his birth. The Browns would have settled in one of the "neighborhoods uptown above Canal Street." His father may have worked as a longshoreman or in the cotton presses. His mother might have sought work as a domestic. Regardless, poverty would have dogged them and they would have had to suffer the displeasing stares of the black Creoles...

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