Oscar Brown Jr.

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Oscar Brown, Jr (October 10, 1926–May 29, 2005) was a singer, songwriter, playwright, poet, and civil rights activist.

Born and raised on the south side of Chicago, he was named for his father who was a successful attorney and real estate broker. His singing debut was on the radio show Secret City at age fifteen. Brown attended Englewood High School in Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) but did not obtain a degree. He served a stint in the U.S. Army, officially segregated until 1948, where his views on “race relations” were considered “subversive. ” In his youth, he was even a member of the Communist Party, USA, which ultimately also decided Oscar was “too subversive”; he was suspected to be a Black Nationalist.

Some of Brown’s musical plays involved Chicago street gang members. These plays affected hundreds of young lives in a positive way. He founded The Oscar Brown, Jr. H.I.P. Legacy Foundation to carry on his work. But his first attempt at mounting a major musical stage show in New York City was “Kicks & Co.,” c. 1960. Host Dave Garroway turned over an entire broadcast of the “Today” show to Brown to perform numbers from the show and try to raise the necessary funds to launch it on the stage. As with virtually all of Brown’s theatrical endeavors, the public was not won over sufficiently to allow financial breakeven despite acclaim by some critics. (His longest-running relative success, thanks to participation by Muhammad Ali, was “Big-Time Buck White.”) “Kicks & Co.

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Popular tags: jazz, blues, funk, vocal jazz, singer-songwriter  See more

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1		Work Song			36
2		But I Was Cool			35
3		Dat Dere			24
4		Brother Where Are You?			18
5		Mr. Kicks			15
5		Brother Where Are You? (Matthew Herbert Mix)			15
5		Signifyin' Monkey			15
8		Humdrum Blues			14
8		Watermelon Man			14
10		Brother Where Are You (Matthew Herbert remix)			13
10		Somebody Buy Me A Drink			13
12		Chicken Heads			12
12		Brown Baby			12
14		Bid 'Em In			10
14		Rags And Old Iron			10

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