Charlie Brown

Charlie Brown – Have You Heard the Gossip?

Bear Family BAF 14039
Mean, Mean Mama – My Hungry Heart – Have You Heard The Gossip? – Don’t Put The Blame On Me – Boogie Woogie Mama / Milkcow Blues Boogie – Don’t Put The Blame On Me (alt. take) – Have You Heard The Gossip (alt. take) – Guitar Boogie (by Roy Thackerson) – Back To B Boogie (by Roy Thackerson)

Charlie Brown is an interesting character; busy raising a family and working as a cattle rancher, he only realized his musical dreams on the cusp of forty. This may explain why his discographic legacy consists of only two singles released in 1955 on Rose Records, a label he had founded.
But these two records alone demonstrate how quickly the Rockabilly spark ignited in July 1954 by Elvis in Memphis set the whole country ablaze.
The first of these records was recorded in early 1955 with Jimmy Heap and his band (the Melody Masters). It offers two sides with a very typical country sound. Mean Mean Mama is a rather classic hillbilly boogie. The song itself isn’t particularly original (but boogies rarely are), but Brown’ vocal is confident and the musicians, especially Heap on lead guitar, provide a solid accompaniment.
The flip, another Brown composition called Hungry Heart, is a beautiful country weeper with a superb honky-tonk piano part. It is interesting to note that Heap and Arlie Carter, the pianist, also wrote a fairly similar piece titled Haunted Hungry Heart. Regarding Jimmy Heap, we highly recommend listening to the compilation Release Me, released by Bear Family in 1992 (BCD 15617).
A radical change of style is evident in the second and final single, recorded a few months later by Brown, accompanied this time by the young Roy Thackerson on lead guitar, Jimmy Rollins on rhythm guitar, the powerful Betty Bishop on double bass, Bill Simmons on piano, and Bill Peck on drums. The singer, superbly accompanied, delivers a masterclass in Rockabilly with Have You Heard The Gossip, inspired by Elvis’s Good Rockin’ Tonight, and the equally excellent Don’t Put The Blame On Me.”
The fact that these two brilliant tracks were never followed up makes it all the more remarkable and precious.
Two alternate versions of these songs recorded as a trio (guitars and double bass only), unreleased at the time, further highlight the intrinsic beauty of these gems of the genre.
This compilation is complemented by a few home recordings made by Brown and Thackerson between 1953 and 1955. There’s an instrumental, Back to B Boogie, which showcases just how gifted and precocious a guitarist Thackerson was (he was 15 at the time of recording), as well as Boogie Woogie Mama, which can be seen as a rough draft of Mean Mean Mama, and a version of Milkcow Blues that reprises Elvis’s arrangement.
Finally, a 2003 recording of Guitar Boogie (Arthur Smith) made by Thackerson shows that the guitarist had lost none of his agility.
The singular nature of Brown’s short career certainly warranted this record, especially in the form of a superb limited-edition 10-inch LP.