Gatemouth Brown 1951. Peacock Records publicity shot courtesy of University of Houston digital archives.
“Play the blues!” Usually those are words of encouragement, an accent on a hot solo in a smoky club. But one night in 1975 at Antone’s original Sixth Street location in Austin, that exhortation sounded a bit too much like a command to the headliner, a black man with piercing eyes who wore a Stetson hat, a pearl-buttoned rodeo shirt and cowboy boots. He opened the set with a fast blues instrumental, but then Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown put down his Gibson Firebird guitar, picked up a fiddle and played a country number, complete with weeping steel guitar. After another shout for more blues, less country, Brown played a Cajun waltz. Nobody tells Gatemouth Brown what to play. Nobody.
Many in the crowd were thrown by the curves, but none more than young club owner Clifford Antone, who had opened his place just a few months earlier so he could hear all the living legends of the blues.
Anticipation was high for the return of the man who had scarcely performed in the clubs of his home state since the early ’60s. Gatemouth was a living Texas blues legend whose bruising, swinging guitar style and gritty vocals inspired Houston businessman Don Robey to start Peacock Records. The packed house at Antone’s wanted to hear ’50s classics “Mary Is Fine,” “Dirty Work At the Crossroads” and “Okie Dokie Stomp.” Instead they got Bob Wills covers and fiddle hoedowns. Sensing a mutiny, Antone shouted, “This is a blues club!” from the wings.
“I told him to get the fuck off my bandstand,” Brown recalled in 2004. “It may have been his club, but when I’m up there, it’s my bandstand.” The word was that a pissed-off Antone refused to pay Gatemouth at the end of the night, until the surly musician pulled out a Colt .45 and put it on the table.
Three decades later, Antone was onstage at a blues festival in Beaumont, introducing “the man considered the Count Basie of the blues.” He said of Gatemouth, with whom he made up long ago, “Here’s the man who influenced Guitar Slim, who influenced Buddy Guy, who influenced Jimi Hendrix, who influenced Stevie Vaughan.”
Through the years, blues purists came to accept “Gate” as a diverse artist of many phases, not the T-Bone Walker rival he began his career as. An instinctive musician who could play any instrument he got his hands on, from guitar and fiddle to drums, piano, harmonica, mandolin and bass, Gatemouth packaged his repertoire as “American Music, Texas Style” in a 1999 album. When asked about Walker, Muddy Waters, Albert Collins or other guitarists he was lumped in with, Gatemouth would dismiss, “those guys just played the blues. I play everything.”
“Because I’m a black man who plays the electric guitar, people are always trying to wall me in as a blues musician,” Gatemouth said from his home in Slidell, La., in 2004, between sips of his morning coffee from an enormous mug emblazoned with the words, “You asked for just half a cup.” The TV had cartoons with the sound off and Gatemouth wore oversized Spongebob Squarepants slippers as we sat down to talk about his seven decades in the music biz.
I’d come there to write a living obituary because, his publicist told me, Brown had inoperable lung cancer and decided a 15% chance of success wasn’t worth the radiation and chemotherapy. But Gatemouth was still very much larger than life when I met him first at an IHOP in Beaumont the day before the interview in Slidell.
His reputation as an ornery dude proceeded him, so when he eyed me suspiciously for about 10 minutes at the pancake restaurant after I sat down, it didn’t really faze me. But then he asked me for $20 and I didn’t know what to think. Did he expect me to pay him for an interview? He wouldn’t be the first musical pioneer to spring a fee request.
The waitress came over and Gatemouth ordered with a musical cadence: “One egg, one pancake, one patty.” Asked how he wanted his egg, he said, “Just cook it, baby.” As the waitress started to turn away, Gatemouth said “one more thing. Can you give me $20?” They both laughed and I realized that it was just something he did for fun. One of many things an 80-year-old music legend can get away with that you and I can’t. Like getting stoned in an IHOP.
Oh, yeah, Gate gave the smoking section a cherry-marijuana scented haze during breakfast, smoking a pipe filled with a mixture of flavored tobacco and weed. I watched him load up just enough cherry blend to mask the pot smell.
Asked if his doctor let him smoke his pipe, he jumped on the query. “Lets me? Ain’t no doctor have to let me do nuthin’.” Gate just stared through me whenever I asked a question he didn’t want to answer, including anything having to do with his illness. His crankiness was tolerable, however, because he always had a playful twinkle in his eyes.
The idea for the article was to spend a couple hours with Gatemouth in his home town of Orange, 27 miles east of Beaumont. But the guitarist, who also suffered from emphysema, was tired when we got to “The Last Taste of Texas” on the border of Louisiana. While youngest brother Bobby Brown showed me around Beaumont, Gatemouth rested in a chair on the carport and joked with his youngest relatives who surrounded him. “Are you famous?” one child asked and Gate coughed/laughed. “I am to the right people, child,” he said.
They’re all torn down now, but Bobby took me on a tour of Second Avenue, where juke joints with names like the Manhattan Club, the Drag Club and Charlie’s Place used to be. “The Deuce was hoppin,’ “ said Bobby, who used to play drums in a band with his three brothers, Gatemouth (nicknamed so because of his large, slightly gapped front teeth), James (tagged “Widemouth”) on guitar and Wilson on bass.
The Deuce is where Gatemouth, whose father Fiddlin’ Tom was a local music favorite, went from country to electric blues. The gals didn’t go for no banjo music!
Gatemouth left Orange for the first time as a teenager playing guitar behind the Brown-Skinned Models, who were like an R&B drill squad. He left town for good in 1945 when he was drafted into the Army which, it was quickly obvious to everyone involved, was not a good fit for the free-spirited musician. He was let out with a general discharge after six months and settled in San Antonio, where he met his first wife Geraldine, and, in 1947, the man who would change his life forever.
Don Deadric Robey beat Vivian Carter and James C. Bracken of Vee-Jay Records by four years to become the first African American record mogul, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was his first signing. A gambler and a hustler, Robey did not get there by playing fair, but he put out some of the greatest gospel, R&B and rock ’n’ roll records of the 1950s and ’60s from a building in Houston’s tough Fifth Ward. “I can out think you AND kick your ass,” Robey used to say of his half Jewish/half black ancestry.
With his 1949 single “Mary Is Fine”/”My Time Is Expensive,” Gatemouth Brown set the tone for Duke/Peacock, the Stax Records of Texas, which put out black Southern music for an audience more into getting down than fitting in. Before it was home to the influential gospel/R&B label, the Erastus Street building housed Robey’s Bronze Peacock Dinner Club, which from 1945 until it closed eight years later was the finest black nightclub in the South. Getting his start by booking Houston’s Harlem Grill, Robey took it upscale at the Peacock, hiring chefs, not cooks, and booking the “uptown” acts who’d outgrown the Chitlin Circuit — Cab Calloway, Ruth Brown, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker. He was also on the lookout for up-and-coming talent, which brought him to Don Albert’s Keyhole Club in San Antonio in 1947. In the band was a gregarious singing drummer they called Gatemouth. Word had it he also could play the guitar like nobody’s business.
“Robey gave me his card and said that if I ever made it to Houston, I should pop on by the Peacock,” Gatemouth said in 2004. The next day off he hitchhiked to the Fifth Ward hot spot where, legend has it, Gatemouth commandeered the stage when headliner T-Bone Walker took ill and, with T-Bone’s Gibson L-5, started playing a boogie and singing words he made up on the spot. Hearing the uproar from his dressing room, Walker suddenly felt better, grabbed back his guitar and resumed his set.
That’s the oft-repeated story, but it’s not true. In the book Down In Houston by Roger Wood, Robey’s business manager Evelyn Johnson said her boss had sent for Gatemouth when the headliner Walker was advised by doctors to take a few days off.
At any rate, Brown’s sensational performances at the Bronze Peacock inspired Robey to go into artist management and start the Buffalo Booking Agency. The label came after Gatemouth’s first two singles on Aladdin Records stiffed and Robey figured he could do a better job. Peacock Records was founded in 1949, then four years later Robey acquired Memphis label Duke, with its roster of Johnny Ace, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker, Roscoe Gordon and more.
Gatemouth at the Bronze Peacock circa 1948. Courtest University of Houston digital archives.
Robey closed the club in 1953, not long after a group of men in masks stormed inside one night and robbed all the patrons of cash and jewelry. Since Robey had an illegal gambling operation in the back room, he couldn’t call the cops — and the armed bandits knew it. The record business seemed to be where the easier money was, especially after Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton had an R&B smash on Peacock in 1953 with the original version of “Hound Dog,” three years before Elvis Presley’s sensational cover.
Before that, Peacock’s calling card was rockin’ religious music. As the label of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and the Sensational Nightingales, led by the volcanic housewreckers Archie Brownlee and Julius Cheeks, respectively, Peacock was primarily known throughout the ’50s as the home of hard gospel. This most heavenly roster included the Dixie Hummingbirds from South Carolina, the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, Pilgrim Jubilee Singers from Chicago, Rev. Cleothus Robinson from Mississippi, Sister Jessie Mae Renfro of Waxahachie, and the Christland Singers with Rebert Harris.
Chicago was still the headquarters for black gospel music, but because of Robey’s label and booking agency, Houston was gospel’s second home.
Although Robey was famous for strong-arming artists out of royalties, his first client says he harbors no resentment against the non-musician who had more than 1,000 songwriting credits by the time he sold his Duke-Peacock empire to ABC-Dunhill in 1973. “I didn’t know about the business,” Gatemouth said. “Maybe he ripped me off, but if it wasn’t for Robey no one would’ve found out about me.”
The two parted ways in 1960; at Gate’s final session for Peacock, on “Just Before Dawn,” Robey finally let him play fiddle on a record.
Gatemouth 1982. Photo by Scott Newton
Gatemouth started dressing strictly in Western wear in the ’60s, an aimless time in his career when he bounced between a gig as bandleader on 1966’s The !!!! Beat, (an African-American Bandstand) which was filmed at WFAA in Dallas, and a stint as a deputy sheriff in rural New Mexico. “I was seeing some guys spend an hour or two getting ready to go out,” Brown said of his unique sartorial choice. “I just throw on a cowboy hat, snap the buttons on my shirt and put on my boots and, boom, I’m dressed up.” Badge optional.
But the country wardrobe and repertoire, not to mention several appearances on Hee Haw with his 1979 LP (Makin’ Music) collaborator Roy Clark, led to criticism from members of the black community. “They say I’m selling out to the white man, but does that mean I was selling out when I was 6 years old and playing country music?” said Gate, whose friends, associates, fans and band members in 2004 were almost all white. “They can say what they want. I know who the fuck I am.”
For his last two decades, Brown lived by himself in a small, two-bedroom house of lacquered wooden walls on the northern banks of Lake Pontchartrain. The interior design was dominated by two things — the models of ancient sailing ships he collected and Gatemouth Brown memorabilia. The top of his piano was decked with awards you’ve never heard of, but Gatemouth kept his two biggest trophies — the Grammy he won for 1982’s Alright Again and his 1983 W.C. Handy Award as entertainer of the year — in a safety deposit box.
His mailbox said “The Man,” his car window said “The Man” — it was stenciled everywhere. Gatemouth Brown was The Man, even though a top seller in his catalog might move only about 100,000 copies. Gatemouth didn’t bother hiding his bitterness about not being as rich and famous as inferior musicians, or even great ones he influenced. He’d play you the original version of “Blues Power,” which featured a guitar tangle with Gate and Eric Clapton, then lament how the released version took him off the track. He knew it was because he buried “Slowhand.”
Brown was not one for humility. But as he faced his mortality, Gatemouth struggled with the question of how he’d like to be remembered. He gazed into space a long time and then offered, “Just remember that ole Gate brought a smile to people’s faces.”
He thought about the question some more. “A lot of people play music for the wrong reasons,” he said. “I never played to get women, though I had my share. I didn’t do it for the money, though it pays the bills. I realized early on that I could create something beautiful that would build love within the people who came out to hear it. Music is the best medicine in the world, man.”
Charlie Sexton, who produced Brown’s last session in July 2004, said the thing that stuck out most was just how little of the great instrumentalist’s skill had deteriorated in the 55 years since he helped launch Duke/Peacock.
“A lot of musicians play late into their careers and you have to make allowances for their age, but not Gatemouth,” Sexton said, thinking back to those Los Super Seven sessions. “We were playing and I was just kept thinkin,’ ‘Wow, he’s still a total badass.’” That was Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown until the very end. Get the fuck off his bandstand!
This is an excerpt of upcoming book All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music by Michael Corcoran. 45 Texas music pioneers profiled.