"...A piece of D.C. history, an establishment, a legacy, a godfather and musical impresario passed away Wednesday. Nationally loved, local legend Chuck Brown lost his fight with pneumonia at the age of 75 and with him goes a Washington that will never be the same. My first experience with Chuck Brown was as a third grader, but it wouldn’t be my last as he was a constant in an ever-changing landscape. He was a bridge between African musical traditions- a D.C. I would never know- and one that I grew up in.
The classic “Run Joe” wasn’t just a song, it was a dance and T-shirt. It was a cultural movement and a testament to those making money outside of the law. It was “**** the Police” before NWA. It was coded song, and call and response that traces back to an ancestry that was there before slavery. It was as political as it was a cautionary tale and above all else a party song and it was everything that Chuck Brown would be known for in a city that can remember when D.C. wasn’t the DMV.
What is lost today is a musical history that can be traced back to D.C.’s early jazz roots and the problem with trying to classify his death in a musical context is that the only counterparts of a cultural magnitude are the American mainstream. So he wasn’t the Beatles or Elvis or Johnny Cash. He was Chuck. One word. One name. One man that can never been duplicated.
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