TEXAS CITY — For a hometown son who made so much noise, Texas City has been awfully quiet about Charles Brown.
Organizers of Saturday’s blues festival hope to change that.
Brown was born here in the early 1920s and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after his death in 1999.
Two years earlier, at the White House, Hillary Clinton handed him a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
But, as music historian Chip Deffaa reports, fame didn’t last.
In 1944, he spent week after week on Billboard magazine’s “race records” chart — the predecessor to the R&B charts. He was earning $68 — the equivalent of $805 today — every week playing swanky Los Angeles nightclubs. By 1950, he was earning $300,000 a year on tour.
Ray Charles opened for him — and emulated his style. It was “like brandy and molasses dripping down that sultry, laid-back groove,” Bonnie Raitt wrote. She took Brown on the road for a final tour in the early 1990s, reviving a career that had lain mostly dormant for 40 years.
In the 1950s, rock and roll and electric blues — harsher and more popular with younger crowds than Brown’s balladlike crooning — ushered his career into the shadows.
Today, that’s where a baby grand piano, more than 70 years old, sits: in the shadows, in a nondescript, century-old wood frame house on Bell Drive in Texas City, in a largely forgotten corner of music history.
‘He Never Forgot’
Vera Bell-Gary stands by the window in the house, under restoration so it can be preserved for its history and as a community meeting place.
Through the glass, blurred by decades, she can see the faces of the people who stopped by the window on their way to the neighborhood store, lured by Brown’s sad, drifting chords and pining voice. It was a scene she witnessed many times since she and Brown were children in the same neighborhood.
Brown’s mother died when he was an infant, and his father left them, Deffaa writes in the liner notes of “A Life in the Blues” on Rounder Records. Deffaa’s research included interviews with Brown and others close to him.
Brown’s maternal grandparents raised him, forcing him to take piano lessons. The blues were off limits, so he played only church music until he was sure his grandmother was out of earshot. He sometimes played at Barbour’s Chapel Baptist Church.
“They used to have me sing at funerals,” Brown told Deffaa. “I’d sing sad.”
At Central High School in Galveston, Brown’s chemistry teacher, a Mr. James, moonlighted as a musician with groups that played one-night stands at white clubs on the beach front. Brown worked for him and absorbed popular music.
He graduated with honors and went to Prairie View College (now Prairie View A&M University). He graduated, worked as a chemistry teacher and then chemist for the federal government before becoming discouraged by racism. He moved to California and quickly picked up piano gigs, hooking up with Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers.
Somewhere in his mind was the piano he left behind in Texas City, Bell-Gary said.
“He never forgot his home people.”
Early Fame
Alice Rollins Cravens of La Marque, Brown’s third cousin, remembers his regular visits to Texas City, where he would spend weeks at a time to take a break from touring.
“Even when he came down, he never really got a break from it, because it was just as natural as eating,” she said. “He stayed on the piano and organ at our houses, so it’s not like he really had a break.”
She said he never set foot outside his bedroom without dressing to the nines.
Her father, Howard Rollins Jr. of Texas City, said Brown sometimes brought a teenage Etta James along and played at clubs in Houston and Galveston.
“She would look so ... beautiful on stage, and then I’d wake up in the morning and I’d see her with no makeup on, running around with my other cousins, just like a child,” Rollins said.
At the height of Brown’s career, his family in Texas City sometimes experienced his fame in strange ways — such as the time the telegram showed up at Rollins’ house. It seemed Sammy Davis Jr. and B.B. King were in a bind in Georgia and needed some money.
Early Mistakes
Brown’s first hit, “Drifting Blues,” was the best-selling record Johnny Moore and the Three Blazers would ever make. Brown took $800 from the record producers without arranging for royalties. It was on the charts for 23 weeks, but it never earned him another dime.
Later, in 1947, a talent scout from Columbia Records asked Brown to sign on as a solo artist. He felt too loyal to his trio. It was another mistake he would later regret, one that probably helped cement his name in obscurity for younger music fans of the latter 20th century.
Brown married singer Mabel Scott in 1949. They divorced two years later, lending him more pathos for his songs. Between 1946 and 1952, he and the Blazers recorded multiple hits.
The final one, “Please Come Home for Christmas,” was released in 1960.
Years later, it would grab the attention of Marcia Ball, the Louisiana-born Austin musician. In the 1980s she established herself as a leading voice in Gulf Coast swamp blues.
“It’s just the classic Gulf Coast Christmas song,” said Ball, who headlines the Texas City festival on Saturday. “From Houston to Mobile and points beyond on either end of that spectrum, that kind of beat will fill a dance floor.”
Ball said the engagements she played alongside Brown were intimidating.
“It was an education in stagecraft and musicianship,” she said. “He wasn’t a piano pounder. He had finesse.”
Drifting
Brown’s name wasn’t on the song until 1988. His music was stolen and so were his belongings. Disenchanted, he failed to make contracted appearances. He sued a record company for royalties, a move that made it hard for him to cut other deals.
“He loved the horses,” said Howell Begle, Brown’s attorney. “He was a chronic gambler. People he would record for would really exploit him. They would offer him a hundred bucks for a song and he would sell it in a heartbeat.”
Begle founded the Rhythm and Blues Foundation and has waged successful legal battles to reclaim royalties and other credit for various artists.
“I’m sitting on a lot of Charles Brown memorabilia which I would be happy to make available to some institution in Texas City if they were going to permanently display it somewhere,” he said.
The piano in Bell-Gary’s childhood home is one of a few, if not the only physical reminder of Brown’s life in Texas City. The other memories are carried by a few people who are old enough to remember.
Brown played more than 90 dates with Raitt, who won four Grammy Awards during her own comeback in 1990. He released more records and played at Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball.
“Texas City was just sort of asleep at the wheel while all this stuff was going on,” Begle said.
Coming Home
Bobby Gervais, the city attorney for Texas City, was flabbergasted when he saw a blues history documentary that mentioned Brown’s birthplace.
“I thought it was a shame that there was nothing to commemorate him,” Gervais said.
He put together a presentation for the city’s cultural arts board, which oversees hotel-motel tax revenues. It agreed to a budget of $65,000 for the festival. A few weeks ago, Mayor Matthew Doyle read a proclamation acknowledging Brown’s accomplishments.
Gervais enlisted the help of Texas City postal worker James Nagel, “the Blueshound” of Pacifica Radio station 90.1 FM in Houston.
“I was painfully aware that there was nothing here in the city that gave him his props for his place in musical history,” Nagel said. “I don’t blame anybody in Texas City. There just wasn’t a true blues music lover that took this by the horns and made something happen.”
In his first hit, Brown sang that he was “driftin’ and driftin’ ... like a ship out on the sea” — the lyrics that enraptured Bonnie Raitt.
Gervais and Nagel said they hope the festival will become a yearly event, and, finally, bring the drifter home.
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At A Glance
WHAT: The Charles Brown “Day of Remembrance” Blues Festival
• Headliner Marcia Ball, plus Texas Johnny Brown and the Quality Blues Band, Ezra Charles and the Works, and LZ Love
• Arts and crafts, classic cars, concessions, children’s activities
• Free admission and parking
WHEN: Saturday, 2-10 p.m.
WHERE: Nessler Park, Ninth Avenue North at 21st Street, Texas City
