|
|
Around
1915, people started talking about a saxophone craze in North America, and
by 1917 Tom Brown claimed that the Six
Brown Brothers had started it. Maybe they did. The Brown Brothers,
growing steadily from two to six between 1903 and 1911, were by 1921
reputed to be the best-paid musical act on the stage. Audiences from
England to Australia laughed until their sides ached at Tom’s blackface
pantomime in a fanciful red bandsman’s jacket, a huge pink bowtie, white
pants starched to look bowlegged, and outsized shoes bought from a
sideshow giant. Impersonations of John Philip Sousa conducting, an
abandoned pregnant bride in a veil, and King Tut cranked up the hilarity.
Theatergoers tapped their feet and hummed along with the Brothers’
dynamic arrangements of the latest popular tunes and an occasional
classical transcription thrown in for the higher brows. And when the
smiling crowd left the theater, they bought the Browns’ numerous records
to continue the fun at home. The
brothers—William, Tom, Alec, Percy, Vern, and Fred—were born between
1879 and 1890, all but one in Ontario, and by 1895 or so formed a boys’
band in Lindsay, Ontario, under their father Allan’s direction.
Tom ran away from home in 1899 to play for Guy Brothers’
Minstrels, based in Massachusetts. By
1903, he was also the clarinet soloist with the Walter L. Main Enormous
Shows circus band, which Percy joined as cornet soloist.
The two Brown brothers soon formed a multi-instrumental act in the
variety portion of the Guy Brothers show, wowing small-town audiences with
tunes on clarinet, cornet, orchestra bells, xylophone,
and—fatefully—baritone sax. The
sax was a rare bird in Canada and the United States in those days, seen by
the public mostly in major concert bands like Sousa’s and Arthur
Pryor’s. It was also seen in big circus bands like Barnum and
Bailey’s, and occasionally in vaudeville, where its comic potential was
as important as the music it produced. In
1904, Tom and Percy moved to the Ringling Brothers’ Circus, where Fred,
Vern, and Alec joined them. A
year or two later, Al Sweet, director of the Ringling band, decided to pep
up the small post-circus variety show by organizing a saxophone quartet
composed of three of the Browns and J. Frank Hopkins. The nucleus of the
Six Brown Brothers (snappily named Brown Brothers and Hopkins) sprang to
life. During the circus’s winter rest, the act tried small-time U.S. and
Canadian vaudeville. By 1908,
they had become a quintet, first as Brown Brothers and Doc Kealey, then as
Five Brown Brothers, still multi-instrumentalists, but always leaving the
audience shouting for more by featuring their all-saxophone ensemble for
the last number or two. The
Brothers, with Tom and Fred on altos, Billy Markwith (another Ringling
musician) on tenor, Alec on baritone, and Vern on bass, were a resounding
flop when they first tried the crucial New York City market in 1909.
But Tom reworked the act, and New York loved them when they
returned later that year with “Broadway Gaiety Girls,” a burlesque
company. Their stage career assured, they said goodbye to the circus
forever. In the summer of
1910 they left burlesque and toured in big-time vaudeville on the Orpheum
Circuit, covering the U.S. from Chicago west to San Francisco. By Christmas they were back in New York, billed as The
World’s Greatest Saxophone Players.
In
1911 they made their first records, as the Brown Brothers’ Saxophone
Quintette, and by August Percy rejoined to make them Six, again filling
Orpheum Circuit houses with music and laughs. From 1912 to 1914 they
traveled with one of the last major minstrel companies, Primrose and
Dockstader’s, headed by graceful and wealthy Canadian hoofer George
Primrose and portly blackface comic Lew Dockstader, famed for his
impersonation of Teddy Roosevelt. The Brothers’ roster became more
stable from 1912 to 1921, with Polish-born Harry Fink replacing Billy
Markwith and real brother William Brown finally joining the group, taking
Percy’s place. Their
biggest break came in the fall of 1914, when they returned from a tour of
Britain as part of an All-American Vaudeville troupe and joined the cast
of Chin Chin, a Broadway musical
extravaganza starring Fred Stone, a singing, dancing acrobat who was then
one of the stage’s biggest surefire draws. For the next nine years they
were featured in three Stone hits, starting in Manhattan’s Globe Theatre
for a year or more, then touring the U.S. and Canada.
Chin Chin’s circus
motif put the Browns (except for Tom) into clown outfits until the act
broke up in 1933. When the Stone era ended, Tom tried producing his own
show, Black and White Revue of 1924,
starring himself, his dancer/singer wife Theresa Valerio, the Brothers,
Lew Dockstader, and lavishly costumed female impersonator Julian Eltinge,
but it was an expensive failure. The Brothers went back into vaudeville,
surrounded for a few months by a thirty-piece saxophone band in red and
white riding habits, then going alone to Australia in the winter/summer of
1924-25. Back
from Australia, Tom put the Brothers on hiatus as he experimented with a
minstrel show and then a dance band, but they didn’t click. A revived
Six Brown Brothers toured with the dance band starting in mid-1926,
playing movie houses until the end of 1927 and even making a short film of
their own in May 1927. As vaudeville’s collapse accelerated, Tom sat out
the first half of 1928 altogether, then fielded a new Six Brown Brothers,
still including Fred, William, Alec, and Vern, until 1933, when bookings
grew too thin to live on. Like thousands of show biz casualties of the
Great Depression, the Brothers went their separate ways. Of the many
musicians who once performed as a Brown Brother, at least one is still
around to enjoy this tribute: Tom and Theresa’s son Tom Jr. (born in
1912), who toured with the group in 1929-30. The sax craze helped create
the wonderful sounds of jazz, swing, and bop, but it began when ragtime
was king, and the Brown Brothers deserve a big chunk of the credit for the
madness. Notes
© 2003 Bruce Vermazen. Back to Homepage | Upcoming Performances | EMail the RCSQ... |
(c) 2003 The Royal City Saxophone Quartet |
