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Artist Biography
by Steve Leggett
Street Singer, Born 1875
Cowboy Roy Brown was born on April 20, 1875, the son of a fiddle-playing Arkansas preacher. Brown's father taught him to play guitar and he was soon accompanying him at church services. In 1882, when Brown was seven, he moved with his father to Butler County, MO, just across the border from Arkansas on the Black River. Brown moved to Kansas City while in his twenties, and after spending a decade or so there, he moved to Marion, IL, then to Milwaukee, WI, and then to Deadwood, SD, before eventually settling in St. Louis, where he made his living as a street singer. Playing on an ancient guitar he had named "Baby" and punctuating his songs with blasts on a kazoo he called "Leon," Brown worked a versatile street repertoire of folk, blues, gospel, pop, and cowboy songs. He was recorded doing his street act in the mid-'50s (when he was in his seventies or early eighties) and the session was eventually released a half-century later by Delmark Records in 2007 under the title Street Singer.