Gibson Jazz Guitar

Emperor of the Emporium [Louisville Magazine]

31.12.69

This article appears in the March 2012 issue of Louisville Magazine. To subscribe, please visit Lou.com

Y

ou might wonder, just who is this Jimmy Brown, this South End kid who, to borrow one of his old marketing slogans, grew up to become a seller of guitars to the stars (and regular folks too).

The Jimmy Brown story does in fact begin in the South End, in the Southview Terrace neighborhood where Brown was raised, the younger son of Frankie and Cecil Brown, an electrician everyone called Brownie, with one brother, Billy, four years older, who turned young Jimmy on to rock ’n’ roll, the way a good older sibling should.

The tale starts to crystallize about the time Brown, now 57, hits puberty, and although it includes familiarities like long hair and muscle cars, there are counterintuitive twists. For, although the wispy young kid became, as Kentucky Headhunters guitarist Greg Martin recalls, “this wild-looking, longhaired hippie, which we didn’t see too much of in the South End back in those days,” there was growing within him even then a rare clarity about his life’s purpose.

Source: Louisville.com