Walter Brown “Brownie” McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915 and raised in Kingsport, where a bout of polio at around age four left him unable to walk. His brother Granville earned the nickname “Stick” by pushing him along the dirt roads in a cart, and later wrote the rhythm and blues hit “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee.” Their father George, a factory worker, sang and played guitar around University Avenue, and with no money for an instrument, an uncle built Brownie a guitar from a wooden board and a tin marshmallow box. From that stationary childhood he built a huge musical vocabulary, adding piano, ukulele, and five-string banjo and singing harmonies with the Golden Voices Gospel Quartet, until a surgery funded by the March of Dimes finally enabled him to walk.

This episode traces his path from the Rabbit Foot Minstrels tent shows and his friendship with Blind Boy Fuller, through the period after Fuller’s 1941 death when record executive J.B. Long marketed him as “Blind Boy Fuller No. 2,” to his 1942 move to New York and his decades-long partnership with harmonica player Sonny Terry, with whom he toured 11 months a year at their peak. It explains the bouncing, ragtime-like mechanics of Piedmont blues, why the duo fronted loud jump blues bands in the 1940s and then stripped back to acoustic sets for the 1960s folk revival, and how McGhee moved into acting with Broadway roles in Finian’s Rainbow and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, film work in The Jerk and Angel Heart, and television appearances on Family Ties and Matlock. It closes with his 1971 instructional book with Happy Traum, his 1982 National Heritage Fellowship, his final major appearance at the 1995 Chicago Blues Festival, his death in Oakland in 1996 at age 80, and his portrayal by Joshua Henry in the 2024 film A Complete Unknown.

• How a marshmallow tin functioned as a resonating chamber and let a housebound child master the guitar
• Why accepting the “Blind Boy Fuller No. 2” label was a pragmatic survival move in the 1940s recording industry
• What makes Piedmont blues different from Delta blues, with the thumb driving a bass line under a syncopated melody
• How Terry and McGhee changed volume and instrumentation across eras without compromising their core sound
• Why Roger Ebert singled out McGhee’s performance as Toots Sweet in Angel Heart