Smoky Babe born July 31, 1927

Robert Brown (July 31, 1927 – May 1973), who performed as Smoky Babe, was an American acoustic blues guitarist and singer, whose recording career was restricted to a couple of recording sessions in the early 1960s.  

Robert Brown aka Smoky Babe is a shadowy figure from the early days of the '60s folk-blues revival. The scant details of his life read like a prototypical country bluesman's bio; born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, raised on a plantation, had a hard life of sharecropping, picked up the guitar along the way, under the strong influence of Robert Petway and Tommy McClennan, seeing them performing and listening to their records. 

He developed the same rhythmic guitar style, full of a furious energy, the similar passionate singing and, if one adds a great ability to compose autobiographic blues and to make every standard his own, you sure have with him a major bluesman!

                  Here's "Rabbit Blues" from above album

                                  

During the late 1940's and maybe at his mother's death, Smoky Babe leaves the miserable sharecropping to work in a factory in Alabama, then in New Orleans where he works as a longshoreman while playing sometimes in local clubs. Around 1953, he marries and the couple settles in Baton Rouge, buying a little farm and finding a good job as a car mechanic in a garage. He played at picnics and at local parties for friends and it's like that and only by chance that Harry Oster discovers him in February 1960 during a party at Robert Pete Williams' house (his neighbour) where there are other Robert Pete's neighbours, Lazy Lester, Clyde Causey or William and Sally Dotson!

Oster is stunned by Smoky's talents and then records him substantially during the following days. His brief recording career was limited to a pair of album-length releases recorded as "in the field" location sessions in 1960 and 1961 for the Folk Lyric and Bluesville and Storyville labels. His few recordings display a strong rhythmic sense in his guitar playing with a strong thumping bass line with the occasional foray into slide guitar. His vocals were nothing less than rich, strong and authoritative. Those wonderful records when issued on several albums and anthologies stir interest in the then small coterie of blues buffs in the USA and Europe.

Annie & Robert "Smoky Babe" Brown

But Smoky, quite suspicious, would turn down any offer to appear at colleges or festivals during the early 1960's, liking better to catch his steady work at his garage and his farm than trying his chance on a musical career. He seemingly disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. Other than his recordings, little is known of his life. The circumstances of his death are unclear. Some sources report that he died in June 1975, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc have stated that he probably died in May 1973 in Scotlandville, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

(Edited from AllMusic, Wikipedia & Gerard Herzhaft)