William Clifford Brown (September 30, 1920 – August 30, 1980), who went by the name Big Brown, was a mid-twentieth century American street poet, performer, and recording artist. Prominent among the Beats in New York City from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, his distinctive language and style influenced a number of artists and musicians, including Bob Dylan, who declared Brown's to be the best poetry he had ever heard. Brown also influenced the later genres of hip hop and rap. 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. Brown was murdered in Los Angeles seven years later.
In 2015, he was the subject of a three-part series on The New Yorker Radio Hour, "The Search for Big Brown."
Early life
Brown was born in Michigan. According to one report, he was raised in an orphanage in Georgia.
Boxing career
Known for his eloquence and voice and also for his physical size and strength, Brown made a career as a boxer in the 1940s. One obituary asserted that "Brown was at one time a professional heavyweight contender."
Beat Movement and Greenwich Village
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. The Associated Press reported, "Big Brown's lead startled the convention. 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. In a chatterbox convention, only once did he speak at length, and that was to read his poetry."
Influence on Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has several times remarked on Brown's influence on his music. Dylan, who saw Brown perform in Washington Square Park in the early 1960s, later recalled, "All these black guys would come up from south of the border and recite poetry in the park. Now they'd call them rappers. The best was a guy named Big Brown, who had long poems, each one was about 15 minutes long, and they were long, drawn-out bad man stories, romance, politics, just about everything you can imagine was thrown into his stuff. I always thought this was the best poetry I ever heard."
In another interview, Dylan credited the entire genre of rap to Brown. "Nothing is new," Dylan said. "Even rap records. I love that stuff but it's not new, you used to hear that stuff all the time … there was this one guy, Big Brown, he wore a jail blanket, that's all he ever used to wear, summer and winter. 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. Where were the record companies when he was around?"
Influence on other writers, musicians, and artists
Brown fascinated other artists. Larry Rivers, for instance, made an audio-recording of an interview with him. Classical composer David Amram often watched Brown perform in Washington Square Park, where Brown was known to recite the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman, and also to elaborate on each of their works. In an interview in 2015, Amram said, "One of the reasons Brown could recite Whitman, among all the other stuff he did, was because he was such a good improviser, so when he was reciting anything …. or making some of the stuff up, that way of riffing or improvising on a classic was all part of the same process."