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The Six Brown Brothers who recorded for Victor and Emerson between 1914 and 1920 evolved from a saxophone quartet in the 1906 edition of Ringling Brothers’ World’s Greatest Shows that was headed by the enterprising Canadian clarinetist Tom Brown (1881-1950) and included two of his brothers, probably Percy (1883-1918) and Vern (1887-1964). In 1908, the act became the Five Brown Brothers (recorded by U-S Everlasting and Columbia in 1911) and included two more brothers, Alec (1882-1978) and Fred (1890-1949). The sixth brother, William (1879-1945), joined the act around 1912, after its 1911 expansion into the Six Brown Brothers. Several other musicians were part of the group at various times before its 1933 dissolution, most notably Billy Markwith (dates unknown), Harry Fink (1889-1951), and Tom Brown Jr. (b. 1912). Until 1914, while they worked in vaudeville and traveling minstrel shows, the Brothers were multi-instrumentalists, but in 1914 they dropped their trombones, baritones, cornets, bells, rattles, and marimba to specialize in the saxophone. Tom claimed that the group had initiated the saxophone craze that began around 1914 and culminated in the instrument’s omnipresence in American popular music of the 1920s and 1930s. Though acclaimed as saxophonists, the Browns owed much of their fame to the comic talent of Tom, who did blackface pantomime and wrangled many extramusical sounds from his alto, especially a kind of wordless speech that is documented in a 1927 Vitaphone short. The 1914-20 Victor connection was triggered by the Brothers’ appearance in Chin Chin (1914-1917), a Broadway musical that put five of the musicians into clown costumes, which became a much-copied hallmark of the group. (See the following photos; 1, 2, 3) Their next decade was spent mostly in musical comedy, until the failure of Black and White Revue of 1924 (1923-24), which sent the act back into vaudeville. After 1933, only Tom continued to work as a musician, though without much success.

The Six Brown Brothers’ emphasis on hot repertoire was another big factor in their rise to fame, but, despite the titles of some of their pieces (for example, “Lazy Jazz Waltz,” “Smiles and Chuckles (A Jazz Rag),” and “Sweet Jazz o’ Mine”), their released discs contain very little that approximates jazz, except for Tom’s variation on the melody of “That Moaning Saxophone Rag,” his bluesy reading of one of the strains of “Down Home Rag,” and some playful duets with brother Fred on various tunes (foreshadowing the Clyde Doerr-Bert Ralton duets on the records of Art Hickman’s Orchestra in 1919-20). Their main influence on jazz seems to have been indirect, via the popularizing of the saxophone. They were primarily theatrical entertainers, on a different track from the cabaret and dance bands whose music coalesced into the jazz of the 1910s and 1920s.

The story of the Six Brown Brothers can be found in Bruce Vermazen’s That Moaning Saxophone: The Six Brown Brothers and the Dawning of a Musical Craze (Oxford University Press, 2004), and a selection of their recordings (including the Vitaphone soundtrack mentioned above) has been restored and issued on Six Brown Brothers: Those Moaning Saxophones (Archeophone CD 6002), with extensive notes by Vermazen.