Roy Lee Brown Interview

Roy Lee Brown Interview

Interview with Roy Lee Brown (1921-2017), conducted over the phone by Darwin Lee Hill, March 16, 2002. A complete print transcript is also provided. 

The younger brother of western swing pioneers Milton and Derwood Brown, Roy Lee Brown remained a caretaker of his brothers’ legacy—and a torch bearer of the larger western swing tradition—into the 21^st century.

One of western swing’s principal architects and the genre’s first major bandleader, Roy Lee’s brother Milton was a founding member of the Light Crust Doughboys and the leader, from 1932 to 1936, of Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies. A fatal car accident in 1936 cut short his celebrated, still-rising career, and his legacy ever since has been overshadowed by that of Bob Wills, Brown’s fellow ex-Doughboy and the widely revered “King of Western Swing.”

Barely a teenager, the young Roy Lee traveled as “band boy” with the Musical Brownies, providing such services as quickly replacing his brother Derwood’s broken guitar strings, mid-performance. In the 1940s and ’50s, Roy Lee collaborated with Derwood and led his own bands, recording four sides in 1947 as leader of Roy Lee Brown and his Musical Brownies. After a decades-long career with the Fort Worth Fire Department, Roy Lee returned to music in the late 1980s, fronting a revived version of the Musical Brownies. A devoted keeper of both western swing’s and his own family’s history, he published Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing with author Cary Ginell in 1994.