Big Brown (poet)

In 1973, after moving to California, he recorded an album, The First Man of Poetry, Big Brown: Between Heaven and Hell, produced by Rudy Ray Moore.

In 2015, he was the subject of a three-part series on The New Yorker Radio Hour, "The Search for Big Brown.

"[4] In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Brown performed in Greenwich Village, where he closely associated with other Beat Generation poets, artists, and writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Larry Rivers.

In 1960, a presidential election year, the Beats formed a political party, the "Beat Party," and held a mock nominating convention to announce a presidential candidate: Brown, referred to in newspaper accounts as "Big Brown, of Detroit," won a majority of votes on the first ballot but fell short of the eventual nomination.

Big, as the husky negro is called by his friends, wasn't the favorite son of any delegation, but he had one tactic that apparently earned him votes.

John Hammond would remember him too—he was like Othello, he'd recite epics like some grand Roman orator, really backwater stuff though, Stagger Lee, Cocaine Smitty, Hattiesburg Hattie.

"[9] Scholars of African American folklore and folk music have placed Brown's poetry within the African-American tradition known as toasting.

"I mean with Big Brown and Ginsberg, and all the Beat Poets down in the Village, it's alive and well today in more ways than one.

And so that picture of him, with him looming in the foreground like that, with that expression on his face, and with his finger pointing in the air, that was...he was good for those gestures!

Notable, wherever he lived, for his remarkable attire, which often included a turban and poncho, Brown was arrested in Woodstock in 1964 for walking through the streets of the village on the Fourth of July dressed in an American flag.

Moore had earlier introduced Brown on his (sexually explicit) 1971 album, The Rudy Ray Moore House Party Album (The Dirty Dozens--Volume 1); Brown is credited on the liner notes and performs on the track called "Dice Game.

The year after Brown recorded The First Man of Poetry, Moore began making a blaxploitation film called Dolemite.

"[19] Like many street performers whose influence on later musicians and musical forms has been overlooked, Brown's career has long been obscure.