NY Night Train just started a record of the day playlist on YouTube – the NYNT Daily Party Platter Hit up NYNT YouTube channel every day to see what’s cookin’…

Don Robey started Houston’s Peacock Records in 1949 to put out Gatemouth Brown’s “Mary Is Fine”/“My Time Is Expensive”. The record was a hit and both Brown and Peacock were in business – going on to partner up on “Okie Dokie Stomp” and a number of other amazing sides of the years. While Peacock and its Duke Records imprint had grown into one of the most prolific independent labels out there with a constellation of huge recording stars in its stable, Gatemouth Brown’s record sales had cooled to the point that 1959’s “Just Before Dawn” would be his last for the label.

After five years of studio silence, Jimmy Duncan, a local pop star who made his name by penning country smash “My Special Angel” (and later went on to open the psychedelic rock club The Living Eye), took Brown into Houston’s legendary Gold Star Studios (today still operating as SugarHill Recording Studios) to lay down a couple of sides for release on his Cue label. While this strange and beautiful gem disappeared as quickly as it hit the market, its one of Gatemouth’s finest recorded moments… Here you find the guitarist playing a more restrained style that’s at the same time both more percussive and lyrical than usual. The killer syncopated rhythm section is the other star of this platter and a cool horn section is subtle and spot on. And the real high point here is the break near the end where everything is stripped away and Gatemouth gets weird – tapping polyrhythms against the beat with muted guitar strings, sliding around, and creating cosmic guitar effects that enter talking drum territory. Definitely one of the best of versions of this frequently visited “Porgy and Bess” standard.

A year later Brown would move to Nashville and start a new phase of his career where he would record country records, make cameos on Hee Haw, and lead the house band on the short lived 1966 r&b go go TV show “The !!!! Beat”. And by the 1970s he was well on his way to becoming the Gatemouth Brown I grew up watching in Texas – a Gibson Firebird-wielding, blues-fiddling, joke-telling, cowboy hat-wearing showman who released regular LPs to truckloads of acclaim and played hundreds of road dates a year up until his 2005 death in the aftermath of Katrina.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_%22Gatemouth%22_Brown
http://strangerintown.podcastpeople.com/posts/57793

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