Page 23 - BiTS_01_JANUARY_2025

In spite of his early introduction to stringed instruments, it was the drums that gave

Brown his first professional gigs, around the San Antonio and Houston areas, at the
end of the Second World War, after a stint in the US Army. Two years later, in 1947,
he was at a T-Bone Walker gig in the Blue Peacock Club, Houston, when Walker was
taken ill midway through the evening, with a recurrence of his ulcer problem.

Having left his guitar on stage, and his band wondering what to do, a confident ‘Gate’
promptly jumped up on stage and tore into an instrumental he named ‘Gatemouth
Boogie’. Apparently the audience went wild, which didn’t go down too well with

T - Bone, and rumour has it that he earned
$600 in tips that night!

T- Bone was one of the very few guitar players

that he professed to quite like - “I don’t like
the way the average guitar player sounds;
they’re all doing the same whining thing. I
do horn lines. I can do comping, rhythm

playing, but I like the way horns sound”.
Although he accepted that T-Bone was
the “motivator of Texas blues” he

said that his playing was
“negative - so I avoided that mold
as well”! Certainly,
that sounds like a

man confident in
his abilities, and
not afraid to say it

like it is.

The performance at the Blue Peacock Club was witnessed by club owner Don Robey,
who immediately offered him a regular slot at the club, and a management contract.

With that, he purchased a dozen tailor-made suits, and put together a 23-man big
band to back him on dates across the South and SouthWest. On stage, Brown did not
look dissimilar to T-Bone, with his sharp suit and big bodied Gibson L5 guitar, but
his music was much more aggressive than the older man, and encompassed blues,

swing, R&B, jazz and country twang. His style was further emphasised when, in the
early 1950s, he switched to one of the ‘new breed’ Fender Telecasters and a cranked
amplifier, matched to his bare handed (ie no plectrum) playing - he used his fingers

and thumb to pluck the strings, and his fretting style looks ungainly, but is highly
effective.

Although there are many photographs of Gate in the 1950s playing his Telecaster,
later in his career he became almost synonymous with the Gibson Firebird, although

he didn’t exclusively play it - for example, he appeared to be using a semi-solid Ibanez
for one of his appearances on the 1996 Austin City Limits show (referred to later).