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apparently had its own resident alligator - Gate said, “the gator don’t bother me; if I

leave him alone he leaves me alone”!

Gate had decided that treatment for the lung cancer slowly killing him was not for
him. In a Guitar Player interview he said, “to hell with that shit. I’m not going to let

anyone cut me open. A man can cure himself if he tried hard enough - you just got
to be positive”!

The disastrous hurricane Katrina, which nearly killed Fats Domino, was certainly in
part responsible for the demise of Gatemouth Brown. Although he was evacuated

before the floods that followed the hurricane, he lost his house, his musical
instruments, and the memorabilia he had collected over many years. Needless to
say, he was heartbroken, and passed away on September 8th 2005.

Gatemouth Brown made and recorded music over 7 decades, and a glance at the
offerings on Amazon indicate that plenty of it is still available, from his earliest
Aladdin recordings to his final album, as well as the Austin City Limits DVD - the DVD
is particularly good, in my opinion, because we are able to see for ourselves just what

an eclectic and unusual player he was. If anyone is unfamiliar with his music, you
don’t have to spend too much to be able to delve into his back catalogue.

And finally ……. Where did the name ‘Gatemouth’ come from?

According to Gate, a high school teacher gave him the name, because he said he had
a voice like “a gate opening”, although his brother Bobby, in an interview with
Beaumont Enterprise newspaper, said it was just a name he conferred upon himself
when he started playing in Houston during the late 1940s. As far as his brother, James

‘Widemouth’ is concerned, I have no idea where he got his name from, and can’t find
any information about him, apart from the fact that he was a recording artiste in his
own right. So, if anyone knows…………