One of America’s earliest cartoon strips (originating in 1902), Buster Brown was a nationally known name before the Brown Show Company introduced its Buster Brown line for kids in 1904. The shoes are still around, but the cartoon strip is long gone, as is this Buster Brown. Fannie Mae was an anachronistic record at the time of release, and Brown had probably been playing it for a while. Bill Griggs found a poster from 1955 advertising an appearance by Brown in Fort Worth, and Fannie Mae was advertised among the songs you could expect to hear. Surprisingly perhaps, it topped the R&B charts and reached #38 on the pop charts. The combination of whooping and harmonica had been popularized by Sonny Terry in the early 1940s, but some reckon that the technique originated in Africa, albeit not with the harmonica.
