Walter Brown “Brownie” McGhee, born in Knoxville on Nov. 30, 1915, and raised in Kingsport, became a skilled and polished musician whose work spanned folk, acoustic blues, rhythm and blues, and protest songs. After contracting polio at age 4, he underwent surgery in Knoxville paid for by the March of Dimes, which enabled him to walk unaided, and he took up guitar in the hospital before beginning to perform in Maryville, Knoxville, and Kingsport. By the late 1930s he was an itinerant musician, and in Burlington, North Carolina, he met Blind Boy Fuller and Sonny Terry. He began recording in 1940, was briefly promoted after Fuller’s death as “Blind Boy Fuller #2,” and in 1942 moved to New York, where he began working with Terry, lived at the Almanac House with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and became involved in politics. In 1947 he co-founded Encore Records, and his Encore single “Black, Brown and White” protested inequality. He and Terry performed at union rallies and coffee houses, mainly for white left-wing audiences while also playing for African-American audiences. After World War II, McGhee made some small-group R&B recordings on electric guitar, and his 1948 recording “My Fault” became a No. 2 R&B hit, but he came to see his folk blues partnership with Terry as the more stable career. The two were written into the 1947 Broadway show “Finian's Rainbow” and the 1955 Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and they later toured England beginning in 1958, appeared at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, and then undertook a state department tour of India. Though their personal relationship was often rancorous, their musical partnership blended Terry’s roughness with McGhee’s suave vocal style and elegant, ragtime-influenced guitar playing; together they made hundreds of recordings and toured 11 months of the year. McGhee also maintained an extensive solo career, appeared in films, television, and on Broadway, helped bring the blues to overseas and mainstream American audiences, and was described by critic Mark Humphrey as offering a “gateway experience” to the blues. He and Terry stopped performing together in 1982, Terry died in 1986, and McGhee continued performing, appearing in “Angel Heart,” on television programs including “Family Ties” and “Matlock,” retiring in the early 1990s, making a final guest appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival in June 1995, and dying in Oakland, California, on Feb. 16, 1996.