>From today's NY Times:
January 25, 1999
Charles Brown, 76, Blues Pianist and Singer
By PETER WATROUS
Charles Brown, the singer of the hit "Merry Christmas Baby" and a
member of Johnny Moore
and the Three Blazers, died on Thursday in Oakland, Calif. Brown,
who was 76 and lived in
Oakland, was to have been inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of
Fame in March.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said a spokesman at his
management company.
Brown, toward the end of his career, had benefited from a revived
interest in his art, partly helped by
support from singer Bonnie Raitt. But in the 1940s and 1950s,
Brown, as part of the Three Blazers
and on his own, was a star in the new black music that was coming
out of postwar Los Angeles.
Though in the last part of his career Brown played the role of
the blues pianist and singer, he was, as
so many of the musicians in the rhythm-and-blues scene, well
versed in jazz, gospel and classical
music.
Brown also had a bachelor's degree in chemistry, which led him to
seek work in California during
World War II. He landed in Los Angeles, abandoned chemistry and
took work as an elevator man
near Central Avenue, Los Angeles' center of jazz and
rhythm-and-blues. He won a spot at the
amateur hour at the Lincoln Theater, much like the Apollo's in
Harlem, and in the audience were
Moore, a guitarist, and his friend Eddie Williams, a bassist.
They needed a pianist and singer, and
hired Brown. The group became the Three Blazers.
The group became one of the premier examples of the new,
sophisticated rhythm-and-blues that was
replacing jazz as popular music among blacks. Like Nat (King)
Cole's trio (which featured Moore's
brother Oscar on guitar), the group mixed swing, blues and
often-advanced harmony, and placed
Brown's voice out in front. In 1945 they recorded Brown's
composition "Drifting Blues," which
became a hit, and in its introspective, sophisticated way became
a template for a new style.
Brown's singing, casual and with a drawl, was intimate and in the
jazz crooning tradition, even if the
group's sound was deeply based in blues. One sign of the
influence of Brown is that Ray Charles'
early recordings are a direct imitation of his style; others are
that Frankie Laine and Kay Starr were
regulars at Brown's recording sessions, and scores of
rhythm-and-blues singers based their careers
on his style.
In 1948, Brown went on his own and began recording under his
name; a year later he married
rhythm-and-blues singer Mabel Scott. In 1951, he had a hit
performing "Black Night," and in 1952
he had another with a tune written by Jerry Leiber and Mike
Stoller, "Hard Times."
For the next several decades, Brown's style, replaced by more
modern black music, fell out of favor,
and by the 1970s Brown was working as a teacher and janitor. By
the end of the '70s, European
record companies were interested in him, and his career
flourished. Until recently, Brown spent
much of his time touring and recording. In the early 1990s, he
toured as Ms. Raitt's opening act, and
that brought him to a new market.
There are no survivors.
