The Legacy of Charles Brown

Two holiday classics, a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a friendship

“Here you go. Want to try and do something with this?”

In the summer of 1990, my boss at the Texas City Sun was going through the daily stack of mail when he tossed a Rounder Records/Bullseye Blues press kit onto my desk. He knew I was into music, and opportunities were rare — that’s being generous — to do much regional or national entertainment coverage. Writing a profile on a musician opening for Bonnie Raitt would be a nice change of pace amid the daily grind of cops, obits and meetings.

I called the press contact and set up a phone interview with Charles Brown, having no idea that I was starting an eight-year friendship with the writer of two holiday classics and a future member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Chances are you’ve heard those two songs, even though it’s been 33 years since that interview and almost 25 years since Charles’ death. “Merry Christmas Baby” and “Please Come Home for Christmas” are piped through stores and Starbucks in a seemingly never-ending loop from Halloween to New Year’s Day.

Charles recorded “Merry Christmas Baby” numerous times from the 1940s to the 1990s and played it at every concert, no matter the time of year. The list of artists who’ve covered the song — more than 90 in all — is a “Who’s Who” of music, ranging from Elvis Presley to Bruce Springsteen to Otis Redding and Chuck Berry, to name a few. More than 30 artists and groups, including James Brown, The Eagles, and Willie Nelson, have recorded “Please Come Home for Christmas.”

Released 12 years apart, the origins of both songs are in some dispute. Brown insisted he wrote both, reworking “Merry Christmas Baby” for a friend who needed money for surgery and penning “Please Come Home for Christmas” while being forced to work for a kingpin who ran illegal gambling clubs in Northern Kentucky.

“Merry Christmas Baby” is credited to Lou Baxter and Johnny Moore, the leader of the trio that Brown first recorded with in the mid 1940s. Charles plays piano and sings lead on the song but was denied the writing credit he always claimed he deserved.“Johnny Moore was illiterate,” Charles told me. “He couldn’t sign his name.”

Richie Dell Thomas, Charles’ friend who I met in the 1990s in Houston, said she remembered Brown working on the song at her apartment in Los Angeles. “That song is his as much as it anyone else’s,” Thomas said. “Charles doesn’t lie about that stuff.”

In a December 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article, writer William Browning reaches the same conclusion, saying, “At a minimum, I think Brown should have received partial credit for writing the song.”

Charles and I did not talk much about “Please Come Home for Christmas,” and I didn’t know the backstory until I read a Steven Rosen’s 2014 Cincinnati Enquirer article. In it, Rosen notes that Brown worked in gambling clubs owned by the notorious Frank “Screw” Andrews from 1959 to 1961. By this point, his star had faded — Charles had not had a hit since 1952 — and he was in heavy debt due to a lifelong gambling habit. He became Andrews’ house pianist, working with fellow singer/pianist Amos Milburn.

In 1960, Syd Nathan of King Records asked Brown if he could “write something as good as ‘Merry Christmas Baby’.” The result was “Please Come Home for Christmas,” Brown’s last hit as part of a split single with Milburn’s “Christmas Comes but Once a Year.” Brown claimed the song was a solo effort, but King Records musician Gene Rudd received a co-writing credit.

Had Brown gotten his proper recognition for those two songs — and, if we’re being honest, not gambled as much — the royalties would have left him financially comfortable long before his 1990s comeback. But, like other artists who saw potential windfalls vanish without a trace, he didn’t get to benefit from his creation.

Texas and Beyond

When we first talked, in 1990, Brown’s career was getting a huge boost from Raitt, whose own comeback had started the year before with the release of the Grammy Award-winning “Nick of Time.”

“I love her,” Brown told me over the phone. “She’s been very good to me.”

By this point, at age 70, he was nostalgic, grateful, and quick to turn on the charm. He described growing up in Texas City in the 1920s and 1930s, raised by his grandmother, Swannee Simpson, after his mother died when he was 6 months old.

Brown’s grandmother started teaching him church music on the piano when he was 4, pushing him to play more with his left hand than his right. “She liked the deeper sounds you got from your left hand, and said you were taking the easy way out if you spent most of your time on the right side of the piano,” he said. “She’d make me hold my right hand behind my back and play with just my left.”

When Charles was 11, his grandmother took him to “the Rev. Cole’s” Baptist church. Cole, Brown said, was so charismatic that “he had the sisters rolling. They were carrying them out on stretchers.” He also was “jazzing up those spirituals just like the blues, and I was hooked. I wanted to play like that.”

Charles started taking lessons from one of the church members, but his grandmother pushed him to get an education. He graduated in 1942 with a chemistry degree from Prairie View College, worked as a high school teacher for a year, then as a junior chemist at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. Ruled ineligible for the draft due to asthma, he moved to California in 1944 and started playing music.

B.B. King, who I interviewed in 1991, said he always wondered why Brown chose the life of a musician.

“We were all jealous of him because he went to college,” King said. “He had so many more options than the rest of us.”

Conversations: B.B. King

Early Hits, Big Influence

Within months of moving to Los Angeles, Brown had abandoned chemistry and joined Johnny Moore & The Three Blazers. In 1945, Brown had his first hit, “Drifting Blues,” which has been covered by numerous musicians. Soon, performers such as Ray Charles started copping Brown’s mix of jazz and blues.

“I loved and imitated Nat Cole and Charles Brown,” Charles wrote in his 1979 autobiography, Brother Ray. “I had been stealing their licks and singing and playing like them for years. I had my first hit with a Charles Brown-influenced number, `Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand'."

Charles went solo in 1948, signed to Aladdin Records and saw his music shoot up the charts. Between 1949 and 1952, his songs spent 103 weeks on Billboard’s Race Chart, including 29 weeks at No. 1.

“I was living it up,” Charles told me, noting that his next-door neighbor at the time was Billie Holiday. “But things change.”

Charles continued to record throughout the 1950s and 1960s for multiple labels, but with limited success as his style fell out of vogue. As the gigs dried up, he worked as a music teacher and for a janitorial service to make ends meet. And he made some poor business decisions.

Although Charles didn’t drink, he loved to gamble. He refused to play piano for Sam Cooke’s “Night Beat” album in 1963, noting that he was offered only $75 for the session and “I could make more than that at the track.” Cooke cut the album in four days and featured two of Charles’ songs on it, but he saw no residuals because he had sold the publishing.

In 1986, a chance encounter with a Steinway piano in one of the Beverly Hills mansions he was cleaning started his comeback. The story he told me makes a great tale, whether it’s true or not.

“We were working in one of those big houses, and I saw this piano,” Charles said. “It was a Steinway, and no piano player would turn down a chance to play a Steinway, no matter if you had permission or not. I sat down and started playing, and the owner of the house found me. She liked what she heard and asked me to play for a party she was having.”

It was at the party that an executive for Alligator Records asked Brown to return to the studio. The subsequent album, “One More for the Road,” received enough notice to get Brown back on stage, where he struck up a conversation with Raitt at the Blue Note in New York. A longtime fan of Brown’s work, Raitt offered him the opening slot on her tour, which is how we met.

Backstage with Legends

Two hours into our phone interview, Brown asked if I was going to the show at the Woodlands Pavilion. He offered to leave tickets and a backstage pass for me at will call. After the show, we met in his dressing room and started talking like we had known each other for a lifetime.

A few minutes into the conversation, someone opened the door and asked if some folks could take a picture. Charles obliged, and into the room walked Raitt, Lyle Lovett, Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, and Jeff Healey.

If I had been chewing gum, I would have swallowed it then and there.

After the picture was taken, Raitt stayed behind and sat in the chair next to me. “Who the hell are you?” she asked before Charles made a formal introduction and noted I was from his hometown.

“I love this man,” Raitt said. “If more people were like him, there would be no war. He is just filled with love.”

The day before the concert, Raitt had performed “Amazing Grace” with Jackson Browne and Stevie Wonder at Stevie Ray Vaughan’s funeral in Dallas. I had snagged the wire photo from work and gave it to Raitt.

She sighed. “That was a day I’ll never forget.”

A few minutes passed and Charles had to change and get on the bus for the next tour stop. But before he left, he gave me his home phone number and asked me to give him a call when he got back to California.

“It’s always nice to talk to someone from my hometown,” he said.

‘All My Life’

For the next eight years, every four to six weeks, Charles and I talked on the phone. He’d tell stories about Texas City and the musicians he’d encountered, ask questions about my work and family, and then cut the conversation when it was time to leave for the track.

I saw him perform twice more in Houston before I moved to North Carolina in 1993. Two years later, I was thrilled to hear he would be out with Raitt and Ruth Brown on the “Caravan of Blues” tour. We met for dinner in Raleigh, and he regaled me and others at the table with tales of love and marriage and music. He talked about betting on the horses, saying simply, “It’s my hobby.”

On the way back, Charles asked how I was doing. Jill and I had met, but we were both going through divorces and the relationship was not yet on solid ground. I mentioned to Charles that “All My Life,” the title track from the 1990 album that led to our interview, was a perfect summation of my feelings for her. I also mentioned that Jill didn’t fully believe me when I told her of the friendship Charles and I shared.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s do something about that.”

Sitting in the hotel lobby, he asked for a piece of paper and a pen, then took 10 minutes to write her a one-page note. The note mentioned what I had told him about “All My Life” and ended with “Forget my concern, it’s only real.”

As he handed me the letter, I knew it was.

Flash forward four months. Charles is on the road with his small band, playing in Carrboro. He wanted to meet Jill, so we arrived for the soundcheck. I asked him to play a snippet of “All My Life” for us.

“Can’t do it,” he said, picking at the piano. “Don’t like the introduction.”

That night, at the show, he asked the two of us to stand. He told the audience the basics of our story, and of how I had pestered him to play the song. He then ordered us to look into each other’s eyes as he sang “All My Life” just for us and several hundred of his newest, closest friends.

Over the next few years, Charles and I continued our long-distance phone conversations. Finally financially stable, he had moved into a one-bedroom unit in a Berkeley senior-citizen housing project and continued to record music.

In 1997, he received a Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts at the White House. The next month, he was feted at the end of the San Francisco Jazz Festival by Raitt, Ruth Brown and John Lee Hooker, among others.

In 1998, we talked only two or three times. Jill and I were busy with a toddler and two newborns, and Charles’ health was starting to fade. When the notice came in December 1998 that he had been selected as an “Early Influencer” by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I tried to call but could not reach him.

In January 1999, just two months before the induction ceremony, Charles died of congestive heart failure. His age was listed as 76 in some quarters, 78 in others.

Eight years before, during the meeting in his dressing room, I asked Charles if he had ever been recognized by his hometown. He laughed and said no but, “That sure would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

After writing the story and a subsequent column on him, I thought Texas City would find some way to honor one of its most famous residents, but it took 19 years before that happened. Today, a bust of Charles hangs in the Charles T. Doyle Convention Center, and he is recognized annually during the city’s Juneteenth celebration.

I just wish he was alive to see it.