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CLEO BROWN

Cleo Patra Brown was born in Meridian, Mississippi on August 8, 1909 – possible is also the year of birth in 1903. She grew up in a musical household and started singing in her father's church as a young girl. In 1919 her family moved to Chicago and now she began studying piano.
Around that time she learnt the boogie piano style from his brother Everett who played sometimes with Clarence 'Pinetop' Smith. Already in the early 1920s she was working professionally in clubs and vaudeville shows as well as broadcasting live with her own regular radio show. 10 years after she was well-established and from the 1930s to the early 1950s she performed in cities across the States and recorded for Decca Records among other labels.
 

Cleo Brown was the first black female performer playing boogie-woogie. Her brilliant stride piano playing (Pelican Stomp, Breakin' In A Pair Of Shoes, My Gal Mezzanine) was often compared to Fats Waller – the compliment 'female Fats Waller' appears correct. She is accepted along with pianists such as Freddie Slack or Bob Zurke as one of the most prominent boogie-woogie players of the second generation. But there were two sides showing her musical talent performed in Pinetop's Boogie or Cleo’s Boogie: her voice and her piano playing.

Around the late 1940s Brown was going through a religious experience that made singing about the usual tawdry classic blues themes a bit unsettling. She retired from music in 1953 and took up nursing. She disappeared for long time of the image plane. 1987 the pianist Marian McPartland picked her up in Denver, Colorado, where she played organ in a church. Brown lived there very withdrawn and dedicated herself excluding her family and Gospel. She returned to record again and performed on National Public Radio - the final chapters of a legend. But her phenomenally repertoire from the 1930's like the breath-taking Pelican Stomp she played never again. On April 15, 1995 she died in Denver, Colorado, aged 85.

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