John Philip Larson
It’s a Thursday evening in Natchez, Mississippi, and Maggie Nettles Brown is performing at Smoot’s Grocery, the retro-cool, corrugated tin-clad blues lounge on Broadway Street. The place is about half-filled with locals. Unbothered by the low buzz of social chatter and laughter, Brown plays percussively alongside her guitarist and bandmate, Brint Anderson, who complements her with dazzling slide work on his resonator.
In Brown’s music, an attuned listener can easily locate the precise point at which country music and the blues converge—two quintessentially American musical forms that have cross-pollinated for decades, created by poor whites and blacks. In such songs as “Black River Blues,” Brown’s blues influences meld seamlessly with her musical grounding in deep country music. In the tradition of Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams, Brown showcases an impressive musical versatility, moving easily between blues, country and rock genres, and blending them into compelling songs that embed themselves for days in the listener’s consciousness.
Striking in a spaghetti strap dress, with long blond hair falling over her shoulders, Brown’s voice is dusky and powerful as she sings the opening verse of “Forty Dollars,” the leadoff song from her eponymous 2003 record.
“Forty dollars worth of Lyle Lovett
Twenty dollars worth of gas
Might not get her back to Texas
But she might outrun the past.”
The past weighs heavy on Brown, and it deeply informs the musical evolution of this Mississippi-born, Louisiana-raised singer-songwriter whose career has alternately soared, spiraled and, finally, hard-landed her back at the place it began. Blues and country are the musical vernacular of heartache, sadness, and suffering, and Brown speaks it fluently in her songs.
The First Chords
Born in Meadville, Mississippi, in May 1964, Brown’s family moved to Lake St. John, near Ferriday, Louisiana, when she was four years old. Early on, she exhibited a precocious aptitude for music, and as a shy child, ill at ease with her peers, it became her refuge.
“It got serious at age twelve when I locked myself in my room and learned seven chords on an old, cheap nylon string guitar,” remembered Brown.
“When I turned fourteen, my mother told me that God wanted her to start a band. She wanted it to be all country, and maybe some Creedence, so we started a high school band. I played in my first bar when I was fourteen.”
“They liked us at Billy Bob’s because I was different. They would announce my band, ‘From the swamplands of Louisiana, Maggie Nettles!’ And I’d come out in my bare feet. We always started the show with ‘Polk Salad Annie.’”
—Maggie Brown
Brown became a regular performer in the country bars up and down Highway 84, in addition to playing private parties and the old St. John Club. When she was sixteen, she was invited to perform on the Louisiana Hayride, in Shreveport. “I remember I sang ‘Driving My Life Away’ by Eddie Rabbitt, and ‘City of New Orleans.’”
After graduating from high school in 1982, Brown moved to Central Texas with her mother and brothers. “In Texas, you can play at a different bar every night of the year,” she said. “They love music in Texas.”
Billy Bob’s Texas, in Fort Worth, bills itself as the world’s largest honky tonk. Maggie began performing at Billy Bob’s one week a month, opening for rock and country royalty acts. There, she opened for the Allman Brothers, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, and many others.
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“They liked us at Billy Bob’s because I was different. They would announce my band, ‘From the swamplands of Louisiana, Maggie Nettles!’ And I’d come out in my bare feet. We always started the show with ‘Polk Salad Annie.’”
In 1984, Brown and her band won the Texas “Battle of the Bands” and squared off against the winner of the Louisiana Battle, a band called Bayou with a lead singer named Tracy Adkins—later Trace Adkins.
“I remember watching him and going ‘What a voice!’” A couple of years later, Brown and Adkins crossed paths again and became romantically involved. After about a year, the relationship ended acrimoniously. Adkins would go on to become one of country music’s most successful performers—and a thread of continuity woven through Brown’s heart and her music.
To and From Music City
In November 1987, Brown’s mother determined that the family should move to Nashville to further her daughter’s career and connect her with the country music establishment. It didn’t take long for Brown to attract the attention of Tanya Tucker’s producer, Jerry Crutchfield. Impressed with her songwriting, he offered her his studio to cut three demo tracks, at his expense. It was a bona fide big break. But Maggie was not one to savor the moment.
“I never could enjoy the moment because I was always wondering what was next,” she said. “Here I had just met with Tanya Tucker’s producer, and he had offered to do a demo for me for free. And on our way back to the plane—a private plane—I looked at my manager and said, ‘What’s next?’ And it has always been that way for me. I have always wanted to know, ‘What’s next?’”
John Philip Larson
These days, Maggie Brown plays frequently at the Natchez music venue, Smoot’s Grocery, both solo and with her band. She’s pictured here with bandmate Brint Anderson, who plays a resonator guitar.
On February 1, 1987, Brown’s mother began exhibiting flu-like symptoms, and was admitted to the hospital. Four days later, she died from meningitis. The indomitable force behind Brown’s career was, so suddenly, gone.
After the funeral, Brown’s return to Nashville was short-lived. On a night out at a country bar, left behind by her friend, Brown was offered a ride home by a man she had been dancing with. In the car, he attempted to assault her. When she fought back, he left her standing on the side of a Nashville interstate. Alone and afraid in Nashville, Brown decided to return home to Louisiana, her music career seemingly ended. “I’d had the hell scared out of me.”
A Return to the Song
In the following years, Brown married. The couple had two children, Mattie and Jacob, and settled in Natchez. “All I wanted was ‘normal.’ So I got a big dose of ‘normal.’ I didn’t know how to exist without someone taking care of me.”
After a musical hiatus of several years, Brown began playing at Pulley Bones, a restaurant at the Natchez Depot that featured live music outdoors on the rail platform. One afternoon, country singer Ty Herndon, who was performing on the Lady Luck casino boat berthed at Under-the-Hill, stopped by the restaurant and heard Brown singing. Dazzled by what he heard, Herndon asked her, “Girl, what in the hell are you doing in Natchez, Mississippi?”
“It’s a long story,” she replied.
Brown’s marriage ended in 1999. “My husband and I had gone to see Trace Adkins at the Texas Club in Baton Rouge. Trace was very nice, very sweet—he dedicated songs to me. Driving home after the show my heart was just killing me. ‘There’s a Girl in Texas’—Trace wrote that about me. My heart broke all over again. So on the way home I started writing ‘Used Cars,’ which was on my first CD.”
After her divorce, Brown attempted to reestablish industry connections in Nashville in hopes of landing a record deal. In her mid-thirties, she struggled to find a place in the cookie cutter imagery of the country music industry.
“Women in Nashville have always been expected to be pretty, to act a certain way, and to be a certain age,” she said. “So in my thirties, Nashville told me I was too old, and too left of center—which meant ‘not country.’”
If pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth and the wellspring of artistic creativity, then Brown is right on track for a personal and musical renaissance that may lift her to the success that has always seemed just beyond her grasp.
Feeling defeated, Maggie resumed playing dates in Natchez and the surrounding area. Then, one of her friends signed her up for a songwriting contest in Baton Rouge, and Maggie won. “I won the damn thing. Everybody else had a band. I played acoustic.”
One of the judges at the show was local producer, Jeff Ford.
“Maggie blew me away; she was just so authentic,” Ford recalled. “I kept thinking she was going to get a record deal—surely she was going to get a deal. And it never happened. I stayed in touch with her, and finally I couldn’t stand it anymore so I just said, ‘Let’s make a record.’”
Maggie Brown’s first album was released in 2003 to critical acclaim, but lukewarm sales. The song “Used Cars” received wide airplay in Texas, and the album resonated with listeners on the East Coast, particularly in Philadelphia and New York, according to Ford. Brown opened a concert for Reckless Kelly in Texas, but with children at home and her second marriage on the rocks, she was unable to tour extensively in support of the album.
Spiraling Down the Hill
Brown’s second marriage fell apart in 2005, and Brown cut loose. “I partied, partied, partied,” she said. “I played in Natchez, but I also played in Covington, Lafayette, Baton Rouge. I played a lot because I had bills to pay.” During this time, she also went to nursing school and completed her nursing degree.
But alcohol began to exact a toll on her. At one point, Brown lost her voice for three months. “I had issues with my vocal chords from drinking,” she said. “So I quit drinking, went to AA and got my one-year chip.
“Then I went back out.”
Brown reached her lowest point one late summer afternoon in 2018. She had been drinking at Under-the-Hill, and felt surrounded by darkness. It was closing in on her. She had tried so hard to break loose from alcohol, but it always reeled her back in.
Back at home, Brown went into her kitchen, drained a bottle of vodka, and waited for the alcohol to kick in. She called her daughter to express her despair. In that moment, oblivion seemed almost desirable. A few minutes later, Brown heard the squealing of tires as her daughter pulled into the driveway. At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Brown stepped back from the abyss.
Concerned family members referred her to a psychiatric hospital in Vicksburg. While there, “I had asked for a Bible. I read it for three days,” she said. “On the fourth night I woke up, and there was a white light in my room. I didn’t know where it was coming from. And I just had this peace. I went back to sleep, and I have not wanted a drink since.”
Redemption Song
Sober since September 2018, Maggie Brown has now been nursing for five and a half years, and is currently working on her master’s degree to become a family nurse practitioner. She balances her career with playing dates in Natchez, Vicksburg, Jackson, and Baton Rouge. She has also resumed songwriting, and reconnected with her old producer, Jeff Ford, with a plan to record Brown’s new material in the near future.
John Philip Larson
Brown also has a new band backing her, consisting of long-time Natchez friends and musicians, Fred Parker (drums), Brint Anderson (guitar) and Jerry Williams (bass). “Fred and I have known each other thirty years, and Brint is just an incredible guitar player.
Said Anderson of Brown, “Maggie’s totally on top of her game these days. Musically, her songwriting is on point. And her voice just sounds so wonderful these days. She’s a Natchez treasure.”
The songs on Brown’s forthcoming record will more deeply mine the Southern rock vein than did the first. Exuberant, and informed by the tortuous and hard road she has trod, the new music reflects the confidence and optimism of an artist who has finally made peace with her turbulent past, and embraced the immense promise of her sober present.
If pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth and the wellspring of artistic creativity, then Brown is right on track for a personal and musical renaissance that may lift her to the success that has always seemed just beyond her grasp. But one gets the impression that if Brown doesn’t quite get there, she will be fine with that too.
Over lunch at The Camp restaurant in Natchez, with the Mississippi River sliding sullenly past Under-the-Hill, Brown fixes her listener with an intense gaze. Still stunning at fifty-five, one can discern in her eyes the residue of pain and loss, and her sheer determination to persist.
“I’m so grateful for every step and misstep I’ve made,”she said. And still, “I can’t wait to see what’s next.”
