Milton Brown - Biography
By J Poet
Singer Milton Brown had a short and, at the time, unsuccessful career, but his band, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, was one of the first bands playing the style that became known as Texas swing, a blend of country, blues, jazz, and pop. Brown was a major influence on Bob Wills and a charter member of the Light Crust Doughboys. He was killed in a car accident in 1936, just as his band was finally taking off.
Brown was born in Stephensville, TX, in 1903. He didn’t’ grow up musical, but after he lost his job as a cigar salesman in 1930, a chance meting with Bob Wills changed his life. Wills was leading the Wills Fiddle Band and Brown asked if he could sit in and sang the old standard “St. Louis Blues.” Wills hired Brown as his vocalist and brown brought along his brother Derwood, who played guitar. Wills was hired by WBAP in Ft. Worth Texas and had a half hour show sponsored by the Aladdin Lamp Company, which changed the band’s name to the Aladdin Laddies. In 1931, the Light Crust Flour Company hired the Wills band for their program on KFJZ and they changed their name again becoming the Light Crust Doughboys.
W. Lee O'Daniel, Light Crust’s manager and the show’s MC, helped get the show syndicated and the Light Crust Doughboys soon became popular on the Texas dance hall circuit. But O'Daniel didn’t want the band recording and tried to keep them from playing too many gigs. The band made one single 78-RPM record for Victor as the Fort Worth Doughboys, but O'Daniel was not pleased.
In 1932 Brown quit the band and put together Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies with his brother Durwood on guitar, bassist Wanna Coffman, banjo picker Ocie Stockard, fiddler player Cecil Brower and pianist Fred Calhoun, the first piano player in a Texas country band. They played the same mix of country, blues, jazz, and pop that Wills and the Doughboys pioneered, but had a harder dance which immediately made them a hit on the club circuit. They got a show on another Ft. Worth station, KTAT, and started packing dance halls all across Texas and started recording for Bluebird in 1934.
In 1935, Brown added pedal steel player Bob Dunn to the line up, the first amplified musician to ever play in a country band at that time. They signed with Decca and cut a series of popular 78 RPM singles that became the album Country & Western Dance-O-Rama (1936 Decca, 1985 Western.) In 1936 the band cut another batch of singles for Decca, but the royalties they were getting from the label were barely enough to keep the band on the road. Shortly after the second Decca session, Brown was in a major auto accident and died. Durwood kept the band together for a few years, but without Milton’s vocals the band fell apart. Several boxed sets contain most of the sides Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies recorded. Daddy of Western Swing (2003 Proper Box UK) gives you 105 tracks on four CDs, Complete Recordings of the Father of Western Swing 1932-37 (1996 Texas Rose) is a five CD 120 track compilation while Western Swing Chronicles, Vol. 1 (2001 Origin Jazz Library) cherry picks 25 of the band’s best sides.
