Big band, blues, blue grass, calypso, Cajun, jazz, rock and roll and zydeco. Drums, fiddle, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, piano and viola. You name it, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown could perform it and play it.
“Brown started crossing boundaries – both musical and geographical – at a very young age,” Alligator Records states. “Brown’s music doesn’t elude categories. It embraces them.”
Born in Vinton, La., in 1924, Brown grew up in Orange, Texas. He learned to play the fiddle at five and guitar by ten. As a teen, he played drums with a swing band. According to the Texas State Historical Association, he was called “Gatemouth” because of his deep voice, which a high school teacher said sounded “like a gate.”
In 1947, the World War II veteran landed a recording contract after an impromptu performance at guitarist T-Bone Walker’s concert.
“Walker took sick and dropped his guitar onto the stage in the middle of a number,” Alligator Records states. “Gate leaped to the stage, picked up Walker’s axe and laid into one of his own tunes, Gatemouth Boogie.’ T-Bone was not amused … but the crowd went wild, tossing $600 at Brown’s feet in 15 minutes.”
According to a 2021 Times-Picayune article, Brown’s “unclassifiable style of American music spans 30 albums. He won a Best Traditional Blues Album Grammy for “Alright Again!” in 1983.
Divorced three times with four children, Brown appeared on “Hee Haw” while living in Nashville, toured Europe 12 times and lived in Slidell, La., for 22 years. A portion of U.S. Highway 11 is named Clarence Gatemouth Brown Memorial Highway.
Brown was a frequent New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival performer and inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1999.
After being displaced to Orange, Texas following Hurricane Katrina, Brown died from lung cancer in 2005.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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