Traditional blues vocalist and harmonica player. Terry was especially known for his
longtime touring partnership with Piedmont blues guitarist Brownie McGhee. Terry’s
music was distinguished by smooth and rapid transitions from vocalizing to harmonica
playing, interjecting wails, moans, whoops, and hollers, achieving a particularly closely
knit rhythmic structure.
Born Sanders Turell near Greensboro, North Carolina, Terry learned to play the
harmonica from his father when he was a young boy. Separate accidents at play, when he
was eleven and sixteen years old, left Terry blind in both eyes. In the early 1930s, he
toured with medicine shows and was a street musician in Durham, North Carolina,
playing for tips with two blind guitarists, Gary Davis and Blind Boy Fuller. Terry and
Fuller made several records together before Fuller’s deathin 1941.
In 1939 Terry appeared in a historic Carnegie Hall concert, “Spirituals to Swing,”
where he shared the stage with Big Bill Broonzy, the Golden Gate Quartet, Benny
Goodman, Count Basie, and others. He settled in New York in the early 1940s and
figured prominendy in the folk-music revival in the following two decades, recording
with such artists as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives, as well as McGhee.
For three years, beginning in 1946, Terry performed on Broadway in Finian’s
Rainbow, and in 1955 he was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with guitarist McGhee. The two
appeared together in the Steve Martin film The Jerk, and Terry provided soundtrack
music for The Color Purple.
Terry’s partnership with McGhee began in the early 1940s. Together they recorded
dozens of albums on such record labels as Savoy, Fantasy, Folkways, Verve, and
Prestige. They were featured at the Newport Folk Festival and at coffee-houses across the
country, and they toured Canada, India, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand as
well as the United States. In 1982 Terry received the prestigious National Heritage
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Terry died in Mineola, New York, on March 11, 1986.
Henry Willett