He performed and recorded with other blues musicians, including Son House and Charlie Patton, and influenced Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

In 1952, Brown briefly joined House in Rochester, New York, but soon returned to Tunica, Mississippi, where he died the same year.

The musicologist David Evans reconstructed the early biography of a Willie Brown living in Drew, Mississippi, until 1929.

[12] Informants with conflicting memories led Gayle Dean Wardlow and Steve Calt to conclude that this was a different Willie Brown.

Alan Lomax, writing in 1993, suggested that the William Brown he recorded in Arkansas in 1942 was the same man as the Paramount artist.

[14] The recording was for a joint project between Fisk University and the Library of Congress documenting the music of Coahoma County, Mississippi, in 1941 and 1942.

Writing over fifty years later, Lomax seemed to have forgotten that he had actually recorded Brown the previous summer with Son House, Fiddlin' Joe Martin and Leroy Williams.