Blues Musician. A first-rate performer with a distinctive string-snapping guitar style, he made his mark on the development of Delta Blues as a sideman for such legendary figures as Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. One of his rare surviving solo recordings, "Future Blues" (1930), was covered as the title track for the 1970 album by blues rockers Canned Heat. Much of Brown's life is a mystery, complicated by the fact that there were two (possibly three) Willie Browns playing blues in the Delta at the same time. In addition he was not a self-promoting type, preferring the secondary role of an accompanist. We don't even have a photograph of him. A native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was born between 1896 and 1900; reports that he was married by 1911 suggest the earlier date is correct. In his teens he learned to play guitar from Patton at the Dockery Plantation in Sunflower County, and for the next 20 years was his most frequent backup man in juke joints throughout the state. In 1930 Patton brought Brown, Son House, and pianist Louise Johnson along for a historic recording session at Paramount Records in Grafton, Wisconsin. While there he cut six sides on his own but only one disc, "M & O Blues" with "Future Blues", was released; the others are lost and considered something of a holy grail among blues collectors. His one other solo track is the mellower "Make Me A Pallet On The Floor" (1941), recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Like others in Patton's circle Brown was initially dismissive of the teenaged Robert Johnson, but he later became a friend and mentor. Johnson listed Brown as an emergency contact on an employment record and name-checked him in his famous song "Cross Road Blues" (1937): "You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown". With the deaths of Patton and Johnson in the 1930s he formed a new partnership with House that lasted until he was felled by a heart attack in Tunica, Mississippi; House was bereaved enough to give up music for a decade afterwards. Brown was buried in an unmarked grave behind the now abandoned Good Shepherd Church in Tunica. The Delta Blues website raised funds to place a headstone on the site in February 2011. Willie Brown appeared as a fictional character (played by Joe Seneca) in the movie "Crossroads" (1986), about a young blues fan's quest for a lost Robert Johnson song.