Sonny Terry

Whoopin The Blues

1958-1974
1958-1974

Sonny Terry
Whoopin The Blues
19581974
Photo by Dave Peabody

Its tempting to wonder if there wasnt something in

the water down in Durham North Carolina, in the thirties. How else to explain the amazing array of musical
talent around? The area spawned not only two blind
black guitar players, both exponents of the melodic and
rhythmically intricate style known as Piedmont picking, but also the country harp talents of another blind
black man, Sonny Terry, noted for his distinctive chugging rhythms and falsetto vocal whoops. Blind Boy Fuller
and Gary Davis made their first recordings in a New
York studio in July 1935. They both played a raggy style
of syncopated blues and both were major influences on
guitar players to come. (Its worth noting that Davis cut
two blues numbers his title of Reverend and spiritual
repertoire came a few years later ). Fuller cut four tunes,
including Rattlesnaking Daddy, his first hit. In subsequent sessions Fuller recorded some 52 titles, and more
hits, including Trucking My Blues Away and Step It
Up And Go. A couple of years later, in December 1937,
Fuller was joined in the studios by his then 26 year old
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playing partner, Sonny Terry. Together theyd been working the streets and tobacco sheds together around
Durham and Terry roomed in Fullers house. Obviously
the area was fertile for street musicians depending on
change from passerbys it was where the work and
money was. Sonnys energetic accompaniment meshed
deftly with Fullers driving lines, and he wound up being
used on 4 or 5 more sessions over the next three years.
At the time the harp was still considered somewhat
of a novelty instrument. It was used as accompaniment
in jug bands where its high tones played a penetrating
counterpoint to the huffing bass tones of clay jugs, or in
white string bands to play fiddle-like melody lines. The
few solo harp recordings were often barnyard animal
imitations, train pieces (with steam engine and whistle
sounds), or fox-chase numbers, where the baying of
hunting dogs was duplicated. (See GREAT HARP PLAYERS 1927-30, Matchbox 209, for a collection of solo
harp pieces). Terry had quick instinct and was able to
weave in and out of the vocal-guitar lines with a deftness that set him apart. His plaintive vocal-like tones
commented on lyrics and underscored feelings, his
whoops harked back to field-hollers of down home
sharecroppers. He also used chords percussively, chopping them off abruptly, so they worked almost as a
snaredrum-like punctuation.
Sonny was born Saunders Terrell, October 24 1911,
in Greensboro, Georgia. He told Kent Cooper (author of
the excellent biographical/instructional book, Harp
Styles Of Sonny Terry, where many of these stories come
from), that his father was a tenant farmer. Sonny was
one of eight kids. He recalled his father playing harp
after a tough days work in the fields and at Saturday
night fish frys: buck dances, reels, and jigs stuff you
can dance to. I never heard no blues till I was about
eighteen years old. (You might want to check out HARMONICA MASTERS, Yazoo 2019, for a really interesting compilation of string-band and blues tunes with harp
accompaniment both styles being played equally by
blacks and whites. The notes make the point that whites
recorded more harp blues in the 1920s than did blacks.
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Photo by Pete Seeger

It wasnt until the 1930s that the pendulum swung the

other way).
From the time he was eight on, Terry would grab
the harmonica off the mantelpiece while dad was at work
and fool with it, but he didnt really start playing seriously until he went blind. There were two separate accidents the first when he was eleven. He was pounding
a stick on a chair, when it broke, it blinded him in his
left eye. He managed to stay in school and continue
working the farm, driving tractor, until another accident,
when he was 16. A neighboring boy threw a piece of
metal, it caught Sonnys right eye, and left him with
only a sense of light and dark. Sonny was ashamed to
be seen and spent two years hiding in the house.
It was after the family moved to Shelby, North Carolina, that Terry broke out of his shell. After his dad was
killed in a road accident, Terry went out on his own,
started going to dances and began playing for change
on the streets. There werent too many career options
for a blind black youth in depression times, but Sonny
got by, making 3 or 4 dollars a weekend, (good money
in those days), playing near the tobacco plants with a
guitar partner. Later he hooked up with a medicine show,
traveling the back roads of North Carolina for $3 a week.
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It was Sonnys job to draw a crowd with his impassioned

playing. He learned to use showmanship, making his
hands flutter and wave as he played. Then Doc would
go into his sales talk, and hawk his medicine, which
was basically watered liquor, good for what ails you.
After a year or so the money got funny, and Sonny
left, going back to streetplaying. When sometime later
he ran across Doc in a bar and demanded his money,
he was told to get lost, whereupon Sonny pulled out a
pistol, and managed to put three shots into the seat of
Docs white pants. According to Sonny, the cops not
only turned him loose, but gave back his pistol.
One day while playing on a corner in Wadesboro,
the 23 year old Terry heard a nearby guitar player,
sounding pretty good. Blind Boy Fuller thought the
same of Sonnys playing, and they wound up playing
together for several hours. Fuller told Terry if he ever
got to Durham to look him up and not long after that
Terry did. The two began a regular route all along Highway 70, sometimes joined by Oh Red, a washboard
player. The three made a swinging good-time blues aggregation, suitable for Saturday afternoon go-to-town
shopping crowds, just right for picnics.
It was while living in Fullers house that Terry first
heard the Grand Old Opry broadcasts with harpist
Deford Bailey, the only black performer on the show.
Bailey was a talented instrumentalist who played in a
country-western melodically oriented style mostly in first
position. Terry was impressed enough to pick up his
Alcoholic Blues. Hed begun playing with a lot of
styles, but with Fuller he turned mostly to blues playing, his harp dancing with Fullers rag time lilt. Besides
music Terry also had a few sidelines going as well he
sold liquor by the glass out of a halfgallon jug, and to
keep up his $25 a month pension also worked in the
Durham blind factory making baskets and chair bottoms.
Fuller and Terry made trips to New York, Chicago
and Memphis to do their recordings for Vocalion label,
some of which were heard by the jazz impresario John
Hammond. In 1938, he sent Terry and Oh Red a ticket
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Photo by Dave Gahr

to come to NYC for the Spirituals To Swing concert

taking place at Carnegie Hall. The idea was to trace the
history of black music in America, and Sonny was meant
to represent downhome blues. (Hammond had been
looking for Robert Johnson as well, only to discover his
death not so long before). Terry wowed the NY audience with his full-bore style, the recordings show him
amply filling the hall with just his harp and falsetto vocals. Joined by Red he turns out a frenetic John Henry.
While there he did some recording for the archives at
the Library of Congress, (eight titles) then he and Red
got on a bus and went back to Durham.
Not long after, Terry met Brownie McGhee, who was
working with a harp player named Jordan Webb. According to Terry, Fuller said upon hearing them play
You can sing all right, but you cant play no guitar.
Terry continued, He learned pretty fast, next time I
heard him he sounded real good. McGhee had recorded
several sides for Okeh, including some Fuller covers,
easy blues. In 1941, two months after Fullers death from
complications of kidney disease, recording manager J.B.
Long had Brownie cut a memorial side, using Fullers
steel bodied National guitar. He was billed as Blind Boy
Fuller #2. McGhee also cut some spiritual numbers using Fullers Brother George nom-de-plume, accompanied by Sonny and Red.
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McGhee and Terry hooked up for a trip north to play

a folk concert at a school in Washington DC, where they
met Leadbelly for the first time. When they returned
south, they continued busking on the streets back in
Durham. They made a good team. Brownies adept
single note runs and loping smooth style were a perfect
complement to Terrys falsetto swoops and rhythmic
bursts, Terrys harp, filled holes and added urgency to
McGhees mellow vocals. In 1942, during trips up to
New York, Sonny and Brownie teamed up with the Okie
balladeer, poet and rambling songster, Woody Guthrie
for a series of hootenanny concerts. The group was
later known as Woodys Headline Singers, and split $15
a night three ways. They played union halls, bars and
political rallies. They worked well together, a short clip
of them doing John Henry appears in the Pete Seeger
film To Hear Your Banjo Play. The duo moved in where
Woody stayed, the Almanac Singers house, a loosely
run commune in Greenwich Village where the sociallyconscious singing group headquartered. Later they
moved over to Leadbellys place on East 9th Street and
wound up staying there for two years. Leadbelly was
working then at the Village Vanguard with balladeer Josh
White; they had a regular gig. There were frequent Blue
Monday jam sessions with Woody, Leadbelly, Seeger,
White and Sonny and Brownie, playing and drinking the
night away, swapping songs and tall tales. These turned
out to be warm-ups for some freewheeling recording
sessions for Moe Asch in April 1944. The money wasnt
much ($10 a night among the group), but they had a
free hand to record whatever they wanted and some
great music was put down over a 2 week period, much
of it only now surfacing on various CD reissues. Woody
wrote of the sessions in his American Folksong (Oak
Publications, 1961); We tried hilltop and sunny mountain harmonies and wilder yells and whoops of the dead
sea deserts, and all of the swampy southland and buggy
mud bottom sounds that we could make....Sonny Terry
blew and whipped, beat, fanned and petted his harmonica, cooed to it like a weedhill turtle dove, cried to
it like some worried woman come to ease his worried
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mind. He blew it down twotoone and let it down easy,

flipped his lip over and across and his tongue sending
all of his wind into one hole, straining the reed with too
much pressure and making it sound like it had several
side tones and tones that dance between. He put the
tobacco sheds of North and South Carolina in it, and all
of the blistered and hurt and hardened hands cheated
and left empty, hurt and left crying, robbed and left hungry, pilfered and left starving, beaten and left dreaming. He rolled down the trains that the colored hand cannot drive, only clean and wash down. He blew into the
wood holes and brassy reeds the tale and the wails of
Lost John running away from the dogs of the chain gang
guards, and the chain gang is the landlord that is never
around anywhere....
In late 1943 Brownie and Sonny moved up to 125th
street in Harlem, across the street from each other. When
they worked the streets there they did better, sometimes
pulling in $100 a weekend, good money then. One day
the pair had a tiff over a woman and Sonny decided he
better go out for himself he tried singing in a regular
voice, (up till then, it had been mostly falsetto), and
found out it wasnt bad. When he and Brownie made up
and went out again, they split the singing for the first
time and the duo jelled in the form it would take over
the next 20 odd years of performing together, alternating vocals or sharing harmonies. Street playing was getting dangerous; they finally quit for good after somebody dropped a jug of water on them from a building up
above. Asch Records put out a volume of 78s featuring
Woody and Sonny Terry called CHAIN GANG SONGS.
There were some commercial recordings for the Savoy
label starting in 1944 which continued until 1952, some
three years of sessions for Capitol, as well as other small
label singles over the years up until 1960. Brownie recorded without Sonny in band settings as well, and
though there were minor hits, not much ever really happened for either of them in the commercial market; they
were a little too downhome folky for R&B buyers but
not for the Broadway stage. Finians Rainbow was
looking for countrystyled black music to use in its pro8

Photo by Dave Gahr

duction dance numbers, and after auditioning a number of musicians they wound up hiring Terry to play a
version of his Lost John piece for a dance number, six
nights a week for two years. The $300 per week stipend
convinced him to play the piece the same way every
night, a story he tells on himself with gusto as he introduces the Shouting The Blues clip seen here.
In 1948, Sonny married the woman hed been living with; Roxie became his first wife. Leadbelly, whod
been ailing for some time, with a progressive muscle
disease, died in late 1949. By next spring Sonny and
Brownie were booking themselves, doing club dates as
well as rent parties, fish fries and barbecues, gigs which
they kept up until the mid 1950s. The duo was hired
together for yet another Broadway production, The Cat
On A Hot Tin Roof, lasting for almost a three year run.
The duo filled in on some English dates for Big Bill
Broonzy, the Chicago based bluesman who had a second career as a solo folk-blues acoustic bluesman
overseas. Their tour was well received, and led to regular trips across the ocean. In 1952 Asch recorded Sonny
for his first album. SONNY TERRYS WASHBOARD
BAND was a 10" LP album of Sonny with washtub bass
and percussion band backup, doing many of his regular tunes , like Louise, Fullers Custard Pie and
Sonnys Baby Change The Lock, an autobiographical
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10

Photo by Dave Gahr

tale of womanly revenge. In 1953, in an

apartment with good
friend Alec Seward
on occasional guitar,
Terry recorded another album which
eventually came out
on the jazz label Riverside Records Folklore Series. Manning
the tape machine
was a young ivyleague folkmusic
and blues fan named
Jac Holzman, who
later founded Elektra
Records, an influential label in the folk
boom of the 1960s.
Half a year later
Sonny
recorded
HARMONICA & VOCAL SOLOs, another 10" album for
Folkways. It included the Deford Bailey piece Alcoholic Blues as well as Lost John and the spiritual
Beautiful City.
In 1955, Sonny and Brownie recorded as a duo for
Asch for the first time, and the result was their first LP
album. Over the years they recorded prolifically, ending up with some 19 pages of listings (as duo and individuals) in discographies. In summer of 1957 Sonny &
Brownie were on tour with The Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
in Chicago, where the ailing Big Bill Broonzy suggested
to radio host/author Studs Terkel that the three of them
team up for a broadcast, showcasing their own individual
styles of blues. After the evenings show, the group met
and over several hours played and reminisced, giving
their feelings on the blues. Following Bills death in mid
1958, the program was released as a Folkways album.
A 1958 session for Folkways with Sonny, J.C. Burris
and Sticks McGhee, Brownies cousin) resulted in the

ON THE ROAD album, and a small tour with Burris on

percussion. This is where the first several video segments here come from shot by Pete Seeger in 1958;
they showcase Sonnys terpsichorean abilities. That
same year the duo recorded several albums in England,
as well as some broadcasts on BBC.
By 1959 Brownie was working with a band in NJ,
and Sonny went on a 2 month concert tour with Pete
Seeger. Sonny and Brownie also played the July Newport Folk Festival together, the first of many such appearances. The team got together with Lightnin Hopkins
and Big Joe Williams in 1960 for an album called DOWN
SOUTH SUMMIT MEETING, a loose song-swapping session where some pretty disparately styled individuals
managed to make interesting music together it was
the first blues supersession. Later Sonny and Brownie
signed with Seegers booking agent, but found his fees
and attitude hard to take, and finally quit after a low
buck Canadian gig. In 1962 they were hired to be an
opening act on a tour for Harry Belafonte, (who gave
Bob Dylan one of his few sideman recording gigs, its
Bobs harp on Midnight Special), then popular on the
growing folk concertclub circuit.
The next couple of videos showcase Sonny, backed
by Brownie and Pete Seeger on Seegers Rainbow
Quest TV show, in 1966. (Theres also footage of Gary
Davis playing before a gaping Donovan on another
Quest entry, seen on Vestapol Video 13003, LEGENDS
OF COUNTRY BLUES GUITAR ).
The first color film here was shot in 1969 by Yasha
Aginsky, a film maker who also did features on Cajun
music, Mike Seeger and Alice Gerard as well. The rest
of the footage features Sonny backed by Brownie. But
things were getting a little tough, tensions between the
two were beginning to grow. (Terry told Kent Cooper in
the late 1960s that he and Brownie were still arguing
over the money split from a gig some 25 years ago).
Sonnys wife, Roxie, died in 1967, then a year later
Sonny met Emma who was with him until his death.
McGhee and Terry continued working clubs and folk festivals regularly, though with increasing rancor. It was an
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Photo by Dave Peabody

open secret that

they required separate dressing rooms
in the 1970s. There
was a broadcast appearance at a 1982
Canadian Festival
where the two seem
barely able to occupy the stage tog e t h e r. I f S o n n y
starts playing while
Brownie is singing,
he stops and waits
until Sonny subsides, and sometimes he would start
songs in keys impossible for Terry to play in. By 1982
they finally split up, either working solo or with various
other musicians, though neither on his own had the drawing power of the duo. Sonny was semiretired when in
1984 Johnny Winter produced one of Terrys better late
albums. Featuring Winter on slide guitar, bassist Willie
Dixon and drummer Styve Homnick, it showed Sonny
with all the grit and grain of yore with sympathetic yet
funky backing. (WHOOPIN Alligator 4734).
Sonny died March 12, 1986 at age 75, in Mineola,
NY after a two week hospital stay. Brownie went on,
performing until not long before his death in February
1996. Together they helped pave the way for the blues
revival in both England and the US, and their music is
still just as vital and entertaining today, its charm undiminished by time.

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Some Notes On
Sonnys Harp Style
The first thing you notice is that Sonny is left
handed, which means he holds the harp upside down
(with the low notes to his right) in his right hand. This
way, when he wraps his left hand over to cup and get
wah-wah tremolo effects, he can completely close over
the lower octaves on the harp.
On the majority of the tracks here Sonny is using a
Bb harp, playing in cross, or 2nd position (i.e. the key
of F). Its kind of fragmentary and hard to hear, but he
may be in 1st position when he accompanies his dancing on the opening clips. When hes playing behind
Brownies vocals he uses a lot of single notes, playing
melody variations, mixed with occasional chords to fill.
(As on Poor Man and Midnight Special). One of
Sonnys most distinctive traits is the percussive chords
heard on Crazy About You Baby, Rock Island Line,
and on both versions of his signature piece, Shouting
The Blues and Whooping The Blues. He gets the effect by using tongue slaps to the roof of the mouth while
simultaneously slapping his cupped hands closed, for
that sharp chopped effect. The latter two pieces also
showcase his rapid alternation between harp and falsetto vocal tones as he builds the tempo the excitement increases. The solo pieces give a good chance to
check out his tone and the sounds he achieves by a mix
of throat vibrato and tongue flutters, producing a mellow warbling sound; check out My Baby Done Changed
The Lock.
Sonny plays with a nice mix of melodic improvisation and chordal rhythm accompaniment, suited to both
solo and duo situations. He knows how to listen and
when to lay back. Spaces and volume dynamics are as
important as any other effect in his repertoire.
Tony Glover

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Photo by Dave Peabody

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Sonny Terry started playing harp in his teens, as a blind street

musician in North Carolina. After a stint with a medicine show, he
hooked up with the popular ragtime singer/guitarist, Blind Boy Fuller.
When he was 23 he made his recording debut, backing up Fuller. Barely
a year later in 1938, he was wowing New York audiences at Carnegie
Hall, appearing solo as part of John Hammond's Spirituals To Swing
concert. After Fuller's death in 1940, Terry teamed with Brownie
McGhee and the two began a long lived musical partnership. It took
them from the socially conscious New York folk music scene of the
1940s, where they lived, worked and recorded with people like Leadbelly,
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, to the concert halls of Europe as
premier blues artists in the 1960s. Along the way Sonny's rhythmically
infectious country-styled harp backed up dancers in the Broadway
musical, Finian's Rainbow.
Sonny and Brownie recorded copiously and were regulars in folk
clubs and festivals, paving the way for todays spate of "unplugged"
blues artists. In 1982 the duo split up and Sonny worked solo even
recording an album with Johnny Winter. Terry died in 1986, leaving
behind many recordings and numerous fans as well as harp players
trying to duplicate his virtuosity. Sonny Terry was a true originator and
a powerful entertainer.
Tunes include: Crazy About You Baby, Buck Dance, Hand Jive, Burnt
Child (Afraid Of Fire), Rock Island Line, Shoutin' The Blues, My Baby
Done Changed The Lock, Sweet Woman Blues, John Henry, Motorcycle
Blues, I Got My Eyes On You, My Baby's So Fine, Poor Man/Fighting A
Losing Battle, Midnight Special, Packing Up & Whoopin' The Blues.
Running Time: 55 minutes B/W & Color
Cover photo by David Gahr
Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,
One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140
Representation to Music Stores by
Mel Bay Publications
2004 Vestapol Productions
A division of Stefan Grossman's
Guitar Workshop, Inc.

Vestapol 13057
ISBN: 1-57940-987-3

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