Brownie McGhee

Walter Brown "Brownie" McGhee (born 1915 in Knoxville, Tennessee; died 1996 in Oakland, California) was a masterful acoustic guitarist and vocalist who helped popularize the Piedmont blues tradition. While best known for his decades-long partnership with harmonica player Sonny Terry, McGhee maintained a significant solo profile. Growing up in the Southeast, he contracted polio as a child, which limited his mobility but allowed him to focus intensely on music. He was deeply influenced by the ragtime-inflected fingerpicking of Blind Boy Fuller; following Fuller's death, Okeh Records even briefly billed McGhee as "Blind Boy Fuller No. 2." Relocating to New York in the 1940s alongside Terry, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly, McGhee became a fixture in the urban folk scene.