Our family jazz band was in Sacramento, California for the famous Dixieland Jubilee with more than 60 bands and 75,000 guests.  Not as expert as the more experienced bands, we attracted attention nevertheless because of our young musicians -- Nancy, for example, our 11-year-old tuba player -- and the fact that all of us are from one family.

     After on of our appearances at the Jubilee, a smallish man in his early 60's approached.  Jeannie's first impression was that he looked like a mad scientists, with graying, over-the-ears hair brushed back in a frenzied manner and rumpled clothes.  But he displayed a clean, earnest manner.  He told us he loved our band.  He loved seeing a family performs.  Then he explained his fondness: he had begun his own career with his parents and brothers and sisters in a professional family band at age five.   He was given a Saxophone to keep him out of trouble while the family rehearsed.  Nobody expected him to do anything with it.  But the next day he was playing along with the band and quickly became a member.  He was advertised as "the world's youngest saxophone virtuoso".

     In Sacramento, no longer young, he still lived up to his reputation for virtuosity.  We hear him first with the Jubilee All Stars.  Reviewing his performance later, the newspaper said, "Pud Brown's sustained sax solos Ranked among the best ever, anywhere.  They were exciting, fresh -- really in a class by themselves."   And that's a fine compliment, because Pud was playing at Sacramento with Abe Most, Wild Bill Davison, Johnny Guarnieri, Urbie Green and lots of the jazz greats.

     Pud was born Albert F. Brown.  His father was a graduate engineer who loved music.  He played violin and French horn as well as other instruments; mother was an excellent pianist and could play the reeds.  By 1924 when it was clear that the five youngsters in the Brown family were good musicians, too, Mr. Brown gave up his contracting business and rigged up what might have been the world's first motor home.  They called it a "house car".  It was one of father's big contractor's trucks, converted for living.  It had electric lights, a commode, sink, water tanks, beds and s sewing machine for Mrs. Brown to mend the band members' uniforms.  The tall rear panel of the vehicle dropped down to form a stage.

     Pud and mother played saxophone, father French horn.  Baby Gordon, just four, was on peck horn and later trombone.  Ralph, seven years Pud's senior and the oldest of the Brown children, played the tuba.  (They called it "Ralph's burp horn".) Verna, three years older than Pud, was the band's drummer.  She had a trap set with a big bass drum, on the front of which was written "Browns' Family Orchestra, Wilmington, Del."   The family was on its way.

     The first tour was a trial run.  Maybe it would just be a vacation.  But they were so well received that they stayed on the road.  By the time Pud was ten, they had played in every American state and in Canada and Mexico.  Their house car logged 626,649 miles before the odometer broke.

     Early in our touring we met a fellow who had a snake show.  He asked my dad if he'd ever heard of 'Busking'.  My dad said he hadn't, and the fellow explained that in England bands 'busk'.  They play and they pass the hat.  The man said, "But you can do better than that because you're a family.  Get some photos made.  Play just like you do now.  Then make an announcement.  Tell the crowd you have pictures of the family:   We'd like you have one.  You can give us whatever you like.  If you don't have any money, we'll give you one anyway."

     "So that's what we did," Pud says.  "That's really what our uniforms were for.  All us kids would go through the crowd, passing out pictures, holding out our stiff military hats.  Everybody threw in money.  There were more dollars than quarters.  We never did less than a hundred dollars, never."

     As soon as they had their hundred dollars, it was off to the next town.  "A hundred dollars, a hundred miles.  We'd go 25 miles an hour in that house car, that was top speed."   They'd pull into the town square, drop down the back panel, and go to work.

     They'd also play in churches, schools and civic auditoriums.  Their music varied from classical to jazz.  The show included vaudeville numbers such as readings, acrobatics and comedy.  "One year we played for a freak show.  " Pud says, "and for three and a half years we traveled with a circus." Pud says sister Verna became "the best circus drummer in the business."   Verna lives in Shreveport, Louisiana now and owns a motorcycle dealership.

     "We settled in Shreveport when I was in high school because my dad thought we put down roots.  We'd had a private tutor on tour, but although I never had much affinity for school work, I could read a tune once, learn it, and play it forever."  Pud's music memory served him well in later years.  He played with some of the top big bands of the swing era.  He'd have his tunes memorized within a week and could look around to enjoy the crowd.  "When I played with Jimmy Dorsey, I found he had the same ability.  Jimmy would come over to me and noodle around on the clarinet while the rest of the band was reading music.  He knew he couldn't distract me, because he knew I had the music in my head."

     Later, in Chicago, Pud played with Lawrence Weld a few times.  Welk wanted him to go with him permanently.  But that would have entailed more travel.  Pud was a married man now.  He and wife Louise were raising three children.  He didn't want to leave his family.

     Pud was one of the featured guest artists at the Sacramento Jubilee.  It was his third year on the all-star groups for special concerts and also rotated to bands like ours to be featured as soloists.

     The Coulson Family hadn't been assigned any guest artists.  We were a new band, and the organizers thought a guest might throw us -- or vice versa.  But Pud played with us because "you enjoy what you're doing.  I like playing with people who have fun at their work."  He didn't take any time for himself between sets.  Instead he'd gather his family and go listen to other bands and sit in.

     Pud's granddaughter, Shannon Wallace, age 12 played with us.  Pud had giver her a cornet earlier in the week.  Shannon had worked hard, had learned how to finger and blow the horn and had learned to play When the Saints Go Marching In.  She made her debut with us in front of hundreds of people at a Sunday concert.  Later Pud sat in.  We played Oshtrich Walk, Pud and Shannon trading breads.  Shannon's were one-note breads, but they were good, full notes and the audience loved seeing a little girl and her grandpa play jazz together.

     We met Pud again when we were in New Orleans two months later.  He had worked there for two and a half years in the house band at the Blue Angel on Bourbon Street.

     Pud peddled up on his bicycle as we were setting up to play in Jackson Square.  Pud said biking was good for him because of his heart.  He'd had a heart attack some years earlier.  It happened shortly after he'd marched in a seven-mile parade.  "That was my first and last New Orleans funeral parade."

     Now he biked to keep in shape and was careful with his health.  People who aren't musicians might not know what energy it takes to play in a show band.  Back in the 50s, Pud was know as Pud "Johnson Rag" Brown.  His performance on Johnson Rag was so vigorous that he started using a bent coat hanger as a neck strap.  The cloth ones couldn't take the strain.  "Johnson Rag wasn't a Dixieland tune, but it brought the people in to hear Dixieland. 

     I was with the Nappy Lamare on tour.  We played in Eugene, Oregon and somebody in the crowd hollered, "Play Johnson Rag!" Nappy said, "We don't know it."  I said, "I know it, Nappy."  He said, "Well, you play it then."  I turned to the piano player and said, "Put a chorus of the blues in the middle."  We played it and people liked it.  The next night we were at another town in Oregon and the people from Eugene turned up again hollering for Johnson Rag.  Every place we went the crowd followed us.  We wound up in Santa Barbara, and Johnson Rag was the big one.  It just worked.       "I used to walk it.  That's why I needed the coat hanger.  The cloth straps would bread and I'd lose my balance and fall all over.  I can't do Johnson Rag any more because of my heart."

     Pud's treatment of Johnson Rag helped start Frank Bull and Gene Norman in the record business.  Pud played it on those promoters' first Shrine Auditorium concert in Los Angeles.  They recorded it, launched their label with it, and sold a lot of records.  Later Pud recorded it again with Pete Daily on Capitol, and that record, too, sold well.  "That tune kept me working for 20 years in Hollywood.  Every place I worked there was a big crowd hollering for Johnson Rag."

     Dixieland was big in Los Angeles in the late '40s and early '50s.  "I never lacked for work." He had bands at the Royal Room and at Sardi's and packed them in.

     Pud thinks Dixieland is coming back.  After last year's Sacramento Jubilee, he went down to Los Angeles to visit his daughter and her family.  He worked every night he was in town.  "I was only supposed to work one night.  But Peter Daily sent out little flyers and the club was jammed to the rafters.  I was a lot of people I used to know.  I played two nights with Pete and another with the Hot Frogs band."  More L.A. clubs are starting to feature Dixieland again.  And then there are the traditional jazz societies.  There are more than a dozen of them in the Los Angeles area.  "People are crying for jazz out there."  Pud says.

     It hasn't always been easy to find musicians who could play the music, even in the '50s.  Pud had trouble getting cornet or trumpet players who knew how to play the melody or were willing to do it.  "They wanted to play the clarinet player's part or the trombone player's part, everything but the melody."  Pud decided he'd have to become a cornet player himself.  He bought a horn and started to practice.  Three days later Rosy McHargue hired him to play cornet in his band.  "I didn't quit the reeds entirely.  Rosy and I would do feature numbers with both of us on clarinet. Every set someone would ask for Johnson Rag and I'd get out my tenor.  (I did get tired of that tune.)"

     Playing cornet hurt Pud's mouth for the first year.  "I never did anything fancy.  I took very few choruses.  I just played the melody."   His band moved into The Roaring Twenties and stayed five years.  "There was a line outside around the block every night."

     Then Pud lost a couple of teeth.  "I got mad and quit playing and went into the antique business."   When he came back to music seven years later, he moved to New Orleans and took up clarinet again.

     Pud played with us in Jackson Square.  He told us about busking.  We tried it.  We put a banjo case in front of the band for the people to drop in money.  We didn't collect a hundred dollars; but that was all right, because we weren't ready to move on to the next town.

     There is a veteran's Administration hospital in New Orleans; we had a date to play.  Pud said we'd be glad to sit in with us again.  "My son, John, is a veteran, and they've been good to him at that hospital."

     When he arrived, he found he had forgotten his false teeth.  Pud Brown without teeth is better than 99 percent of clarinet players with them.  We worked our way up through the wards to the top of the hospital, playing Dixieland, ending in the neurology ward.  The patients wouldn't stay in bed.  They came out in the hall and danced.  Said one.  "Man, that music's all right.  It makes me forget the pain."

     We ended with Emperor Norton's Hunch, a driving, stomping Lu Watters original that not too many musicians know.  Maybe Pud hadn't played it before, but by the second strain ho owned it.  He has a great ear.  He had developed his own system for improvising.  Based on the melody rather than the chords. He feels it gives a soloist more creative options.

     We asked him why he didn't travel more now, giving clinics for young people and concerts at jazz societies.

     He said he would like to, but the jazz societies aren't wealthy.  "I don't like to travel with Louise.  It gets expensive for a club to pay two round-trip fares and a fee on top of that."   He said he wished the clubs would organize a circuit so those musicians like himself could travel from club to club without it costing new round-trip fares each time.  That way he could bring Louise, too.

     It was Louise who got him back into music after he quit to deal in antiques.  "You get tired of hearing yourself play after awhile.  It doesn't hurt to take time out to listen to other people."  Then, too, music's not the easiest way to make a living.  "Sometimes you have to get out to save enough money till you can afford to go back.  That's the great thing about Louise, though.  Most musicians' wives are hounding them to get out of the business.  Louise said, "I didn't marry a junque dealer, I married a musician."   She made me go back to music."

     The browns have been married nearly 40 years.  Pud is a proud papa and proud grandparent.  His daughter, Sandra, is married to Dave Wallace and lives in Woodland Hills, near Los Angeles.  She has recently completed a B.A. degree and is a professional photographer and writer.  She has collected clippings about her father since she was a little girl and is working on a book about the Brown Family Band.  Pud beams:   "all that and raising four little kids, can you believe it?"   He adds, "Her husband is a prince, too."

     The four grandchildren, Dana, Shannon, Donovan and Derek, are musical, and there is likely soon to be another generation of the Brown Family Band.

     Pamela, their second child, lives in Shreveport, Louisiana with her son, Darren Lee.  He wants a sax, and "Grand Pud" will see that he gets one.

     Pud's new album was a family affair.  Sandra did the photos for the record jacket and son John did the decorative illustration that nicely evokes New Orleans.  Pud's sister Verna, the former circus drummer, was co-producer.  Louise wrote words for one of the songs in the album and Sandra wrote words for another.

     Pud Brown is a modest man, a family man.  He has been reluctant to push himself forward.  He has played with some of the most famous jazz musicians: Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, Joe Venuti, Billy Butterfield, Yank Lawson, Wingy Manone and others.  He helped many of them develop their own reputations.  He helped sell a lot of their records.  Pud is now president of the New Orleans Jazz Recording Company.  He has a new album out with fresh tunes, a beautiful and original sound, and an all-star lineup including his tenor-playing partner, Eddie Miller.  Tenor for Two should bring Pud Brown the recognition he richly deserves.