Jimmy Brown (5)

Blues violinist - vocalist Jimmy Brown has known Big Joe (Williams) most of his life. He was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1910, the oldest boy in a family of ten children. As a teenager Jimmy was able to learn both guitar and fiddle form an older neighbor, Bob Jones, an accomplished musician (he also played mandolin) with whom Jimmy worked at Buckeye Oil Mill. After Jimmy had sufficiently mastered the instruments, the two men began to play together in the area, playing and singing the usual round of back country entertainments - house parties, picnics, dances, and in rough taverns. Jimmy moved, first top Topeka, Kansas, and then to St. Louis, in the mid- 1940s, when the government agency for which he was then working as construction worker assigned him to those cities. He has lived in St. Louis ever since, playing at taverns, working with Big Joe (Williams)