Sam Brown

Sam Brown (photographed left by Russ Escritt) was the Blue Notes long standing piano player. He passed away on Monday 25th January 2010 in West Bromwich following a long period of illness.

Sam, whose real name was Ron Daley, arrived in England from his home in Jamaica during the 2nd World War and saw service with the RAF, an organisation that he maintained close links with. He eventually settled in Birmingham, where in 1949 he met the newly arrived fellow Jamaican Andy Hamilton.

Sam, known to friends at the time as “Big Boy” was over 6 foot tall with the build of a heavy weight boxer. He was not a regular musician, having just dabbled in playing organ, but he was a regular at dances where his great sense of rhythm and his huge hands caught Hamilton’s eye.

Andy persuaded Sam to take lessons from local musicians and he soon started to play the occasional session at dances and parties with Andy and the gold toothed Willie Rogers. By 1953 Sam had become a regular with Andy. They put together The Blue Notes and started to perform regularly in church and school halls across the city. It was at one of these gigs, at The Good Companions on Coventry Road, that Sam met his future wife Evelyn with whom he had two children.

Sam became Andy’s closest friend as they shared over 50 years of playing music together, Sam leading the rhythm section with his own unique style of playing drawing on Caribbean, gospel and blues influences. During the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s at venues such as St Johns Restaurant and The Tower Ballroom they organised hugely popular dances.

It was Sam Brown who Andy telephoned from his hospital bed in the late 1980’s to sing the melody of Silvershine, a song Hamilton wrote in the 1940’s for Errol Flynn which came back to him in a diabetic coma. Together they arranged the song which was to change their lives.

In 1990 Sam led the rhythm section on the internationally acclaimed debut album Silvershine, which took the band from Sundays at The White Swan in Aston and Accafess to top venues in Paris, Milan and St Lucia. Sam was also a central figure in the residencies at Dirty Betts, The Bear and The Drum where he accompanied some of the worlds greatest jazz musicians along with many complete novices for whom he always had a kind word of encouragement.

It became a regular delight at gigs to open the 2nd set with a “Sam Brown Blues”, starting with a long solo reflecting his mood of the day and almost always ending with a big smile to the audience.

Sam Brown, who was in his late 80’s will be terribly missed by his family and Andy, as well as the church community in West Bromwich where for many years he was warden and organist and the music community of Birmingham which has lost one of the key figures in its post war history.

As Andy often said,

“Nobody can play the Blues like Sam Brown”