Sterling Brown

Biography

Sterling Allen Brown (May 1, 1901 – January 13, 1989) was born on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where his father, the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown — a formerly enslaved man — served as a professor at Howard's School of Divinity. His mother, Grace Adelaide Brown, was a Fisk University valedictorian and longtime D.C. schoolteacher. Brown attended Dunbar High School, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College in 1922, and earned his M.A. in English from Harvard in 1923. Though he became one of America's foremost poets and scholars rather than a performing musician, his entire intellectual life was inseparable from the blues, jazz, spirituals, and work songs of Black vernacular culture — often listening to Mamie Smith recordings in secret at the segregated Williams College dormitory.

Brown joined the Howard University faculty in 1929 and remained there for four decades. His debut collection, Southern Road (1932), was groundbreaking in its use of blues rhythms, dialect, and folk speech as the structural and emotional backbone of serious poetry, at a time when many Black intellectuals dismissed such forms as low art. He championed Bessie Smith and the blues tradition when mainstream academic culture would not, held unofficial seminars on jazz and folk music when Howard's administration blocked it from the curriculum, and appeared as a speaker at the landmark 1938–1939 "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts at Carnegie Hall. The itinerant singer Calvin "Big Boy" Davis, whom Brown encountered in Virginia, directly inspired several of his most celebrated poems. His Smithsonian Folkways spoken-word recording, The Poetry of Sterling Brown, in which he reads 21 of his own poems, constitutes his primary presence in music streaming catalogs.

Brown's legacy as a bridge between Black literary art and Black musical tradition is singular. Washington, D.C. named him its first Poet Laureate in 1984, and the city declared May 1 "Sterling A. Brown Day" in 1979. His Collected Poems won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Among the students shaped by his decades at Howard were Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Nkrumah, Ossie Davis, and Lucille Clifton. He died of leukemia on January 13, 1989, in Takoma Park, Maryland, at age 87.

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Fun Facts

• By 1979, Brown joked publicly that he had been 'rediscovered, reinstituted, regenerated and recovered' multiple times — a wry reference to the repeated critical rediscoveries of his work across decades.
• Washington, D.C. named Brown its first-ever Poet Laureate in 1984, and declared May 1 — his birthday — 'Sterling A. Brown Day' in 1979.
• His poem 'Old Lem' was set to music by Carla Olson and recorded with guitarist Mick Taylor (former Rolling Stones) and keyboardist Ian McLagan (Faces) as the song 'Justice.'
• His sister, Mary Edna Brown, was one of the founding members of Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University in 1913.

Musical Connections

Mentors/Influences

• Bessie Smith - Brown attended Bessie Smith performances in Nashville; she was a formative influence on his understanding of blues as a serious literary and cultural form [1920s]
• Calvin 'Big Boy' Davis - Itinerant blues singer Brown met at Virginia Seminary; directly inspired several poems in Southern Road [Late 1920s]

Key Collaborators

• Langston Hughes - Contemporary Harlem Renaissance poet; collaborated on championing Black vernacular and folk traditions in literature [1930s–1960s]
• James Weldon Johnson - Fellow poet and anthologist; shared efforts to document and elevate African American folk and musical traditions [1930s]

Artists Influenced

• Amiri Baraka - Student at Howard; Brown's integration of blues/jazz into poetry directly shaped Baraka's aesthetic and cultural politics [1950s]
• Toni Morrison - Student at Howard; credits Brown as a transformative teacher [1950s]

External Links

• Spotify
• Wikipedia