Remembering the Queen

Ode to an unknown local blues singer

Last week I was paging through The Penn Stater, and ran across some responses to a recent article I had missed. Penn Staters from the late 80s and 90s had written in reaction to a recent article about a popular blues band that played the State College pubs over that 15 year stretch. Queen Bee and the Blue Hornet Band was a big favorite of mine, so I anxiously read on. One response went on to lament the passing in 2001 of lead vocalist Tonya Browne, from complications related to diabetes. She was 36. And while I had not thought about Queen Bee in several years, the news of her death hit me with unexpected force.

Growing up, I tuned into eclectic forms of music that my friends didn’t always appreciate or understand.  As a teen, I knew more about blues music than most…Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters. Everybody knew the popular acts  - B. B. King, Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray. I saw Bo Diddley at a festival one summer. I didn’t really know the blues, and I certainly didn’t even begin to understand where those feelings came from. I just knew that I liked it. It made me feel something I couldn’t explain. But after my first time seeing Queen Bee in State College, PA, the blues to me meant just one thing…..Tonya Browne. She was black, heavy, not too tall, not pretty, her hair carelessly, almost stylelessly pulled back.  With a surprisingly tight rhythym and blues band behind her, she belted out old blues standards in a emotional, commanding baritone. She took the stage like a lion, like the way Mike Tyson entered a boxing ring, her wild eyes focused and fierce.  From the first note, her energy seemed to come from a very deep, dark place, desperate to let itself out in sixty-minute bursts.  While most singers invent creative note phrasings and are playful with their audiences, Tonya was all business. She’d pace like a caged animal for about a minute before her she began, as the band began cranking up before the first song. Then suddenly she’d let loose, running over her audience like a freight train. Seemingly without taking a breath, and often with a beer in one hand, she’d maintain this frenetic intensity from one song to the next with no letup. The guitar and sax would occasionally trade solos just long enough for her to catch her breath before the next roar. The Rathskeller crowd was tightly packed in as usual, some standing on cases of Rolling Rock ponies, broken glass and the smell of warm beer everywhere, the drunken crowd happily drowning in and swaying as one to Love Me With A Feeling and Too Tall To Mambo. Then they’d slow things down, and Tonya would reach even deeper into that dark, troubled soul.  The electric guitar would also get its turn, and Mark Ross would never disappoint. He too knew the blues, you could tell by the way he used space, waiting until he felt it, then, just at the right time ripping the notes out of his instrument by force, always making a big, soulful statement. You felt it, you had to. Tonya and Mark knew the blues -  it was unmistakable.

Now these crowds didn’t typically know the blues. They felt something for sure; you couldn’t not feel something in that place. About a hundred 21-25 year old white kids from middle-class upbringings felt the joy of newfound freedom and independence. Their inexperienced systems felt the overpowering effects of alcohol. They felt the pounding of the music, the girl they had their arms around, the fraternity party they just left and the apartment party they were about to hit next. They felt the urgency of the mating ritual and the need to seal the deal with someone in the place they only recently identified. It wasn’t the blues that they felt; they just knew that they were having a great time in a filthy bar, and hearing one helluva band. And I remember the way I typically experienced Queen Bee. Sure, sometimes I’d hit the Skeller, the Brewery, Café 210, or the Brickhouse Tavern on a Friday or Saturday night with some friends to listen to the bands and bar hop. There were many bands we all liked. But to my friends, they were all pretty much the same. For me, Queen Bee was the one band I’d go see alone. I even had a little ritual – I’d get there on a Saturday night, an hour before the first set, and buy the big bucket of beers in ice that would last me for several hours. Then I’d get into the back room where the band would eventually play, and lay claim to my spot, usually the small table, one of the few with a booth seat, one that I could physically defend most of the night even in the harshest conditions. Then I’d hunker down for four sets - they’d play until 2am with short breaks. I’d take it all in. I’d watch the ebb and flow of the crowd. Usually after the 2nd or 3rd set, you’d see the wildest ones move on, leaving only the hardcore listeners and a few serious drunks to soak up the last set. Sometimes band members would sit with me between sets and we’d take turns buying rounds. Sometimes Tonya would join us. And the funny thing was that she seemed a very different person off the stage – her eyes and face would relax, even smile, so totally unburdened.  She was engaging. Her laugh was loud enough to fill the room. She seemed so far removed from the wounded, tortured performer who captivated me so completely only minutes earlier. She sang the blues like an old, world-weary woman, yet she had only graduated from the school just two years prior. This old soul, this blues lioness, was probably all of 23 years. Shortly before I graduated, I met the girl (she worked at Original Italian Pizza) that I would marry years later .   And luckily, she “got” the blues, so we got to enjoy Queen Bee several times together before I graduated.

Maria traveled from PA once to visit me on the west coast, our long-distance relationship still intact. She brought with her a surprise – a Queen Bee and the Blue Hornet Band album! She had even gotten Tonya to sign it for me. The photo on the back of the album jacket showed the band all smiling, sitting around the big  booth in the back of the ‘Skeller. Now THIS was pure gold! I finally had all those great barroom blues songs on vinyl, and man, did I ever wear that record out. Years later, after we were married, we returned to State College for a weekend….and sure enough, Queen Bee was still in town, playing at the ‘Skeller. I recall seeing them at least twice in the early 90s. Now all grown up and well-traveled, we’d crawl back into that bar and watch the “kids” go wild for Queen Bee. We managed to catch Tonya after a set. She seemed the same, talking excitedly about being patient, about building a fan base, and how the band would soon be the verge of their big break. It seemed so crazy to me that they weren’t big already. To me they were the blues. How could the world not see this?  

I remember the last time I saw Queen Bee. It was 1997. A good buddy of mine and his future ex-wife and I road- tripped to State College for a football weekend. He was one of those in-the-crowd people who’d pack in at the ‘Skeller, one who made the very most of his overall college experience. He longed for a nostalgic weekend of football, barroom bliss and the old familiar sound of the bands. His non-Penn State girlfriend was unfortunately a warm-weather southerner. We tailgated in frigid weather, we shivered through a bone-chilling football game, we thawed out in the car, we got to the hotel exhausted….but one way or another, he and I made sure a visit to the Rathskeller that night was simply going to happen. After filing a formal protest, she came with us under duress. I left him to manage her and cut a path to the back room. I could hear the reverberations of Talk To Ya Later getting louder as I navigated through the bodies, turned left at the doorless bathroom (remembering not to go in there)

and passed by the pool table. And there they were, Tonya and Mark cranking it up gloriously, like I never missed a beat. She appeared to have lost considerable weight. I managed to talk to her in between sets. Did she remember me? She always acted like she did, but I knew she must have had hundreds of similar conversations with returning graduates who loved her and the band. She was gracious. With the biggest grin I’d ever seen from her, she said the band was headed to LA next week…. that this was finally their big break. They were just about there. AND she had something unexpected. She reached into her duffle bag and pulled out….a CD! How much? $10? I would have paid $50…maybe more! And she signed it for me…”Peace to you, all the best, Tonya.” Man, was that cool. With my once- coveted album collection the victim of basement flooding, this CD became my only recorded link to Tonya and the band. After that, anything else that happened the rest of the weekend was just fine with me. I tolerated watching my buddy deal with bridezilla and drank myself into a stupor back on Atherton Avenue at the hotel bar, reading the liner notes to my new CD.

Going back to the article in The Penn Stater, I noticed they reported that Queen Bee performed together for the last time in 1999. Tanya was interviewed sometime in 2001 but I was unable to find anything on it. I supposed that if that the interview ever took place, it must have happened shortly before her death, where she lived alone in a small home in Lemont. And I began to think again about Tonya, and what the last few years of her life must have been like. I thought about what might have been going through her heart and mind, sitting there in her little home, staring at a reporter with a pen and paper. Because I always wanted to know the real story of Tonya Browne. I wanted to know how Tonya Browne came to know the blues so completely. When you go back to the birth of the blues, the Mississippi Delta…the sharecroppers, the sons and daughters of slaves, you can clearly see how powerful art came from such circumstances. The remnants of slavery, racism, extreme poverty, physical abuse, no education, no future, no real hope. So much pain just part of the fabric of everyday life, it was only natural that the music that came from it all drew upon it. And the funny thing is that the blues almost always leaves you somehow energized, uplifted, happy in an unexpected way. You feel the sadness, but then a strange exhilaration from it. I think it comes from the performer literally baring their soul, exposing their own personal pain, whatever is going on inside them to the listener, almost saying “THIS IS MY PAIN! CAN YOU FEEL IT?!?” The listener feels it, feels their voice, feels the music, the rhythyms, and then says back…”YES, AND I HAVE MY OWN PAIN”. And the performer feels it coming back to them, and in that moment everyone in that space kind of shares it. It makes the personal experience of it live much more powerful than just hearing it on the record. And somehow before the night ends, you begin to believe that it’s all going to turn out fine. One day we’re all gonna make it through, you’ll see. I think many of the commercially popular and famous bluesmen of today are far removed from the original inspiration for their art, having the sting of racism, discrimination, and poverty, long ago eased by their own extraordinary wealth and celebrity. I believe the only way Tonya Browne could possibly know the blues the way she did was from personally experiencing profound hardship as a young person. There had to be a story there, something significant, because no one could sing from a place like the one she knew so well without a story. In the 1994 Penn Stater article by Amy Zurzola, she interviewed some of the band members, who described Tonya as vibrant, sincere, sometimes moody and painfully shy. They said “there are just times when you know not to talk to her.” You could sense that they chose those words very carefully. There was a place deep down that formed the source, the core of her blues, a place I’ll bet she would have happily traded for a completely unburdened, herbal-tee sipping life as a reserved

science teacher (’85 BS Mineral Science) in a peaceful suburb. But unfortunately our demons don’t always let us choose the path our life will take. Sometimes they choose it for us.

I believe Tanya would have fit in quite well in the Mississippi Delta eighty years ago. She could have sang with Robert Johnson, with Bessie Smith, with all of them. They would have wordlessly invited her into their circle…..her eyes telling them her story, their eyes telling her theirs. And I believe that Toyna Browne never felt the blues more authentically, never more personally and profoundly, then in 2001 shortly before her death. Her dreams of making it extinguished, her health in decline, her spirit perhaps broken, dying alone in a small house in Lemont. How nice it would have been to meet up with her then, to pull up two buckets of beers, to get lost in a great record, to sit on a porch stoop and talk about the band, how truly great they were and how deliciously close they came to making it…..and to finally, finally hear the real story of Tonya Browne. I suppose we may never know it.  

I started thinking more broadly about artists. I’ve known several people who were very talented musicians but who never quite made it big. No record deals, no great gigs in the sky, that dream of being able to abandon their day job and fulfill their destiny always just out of reach. But my artist friends managed to fill themselves with more than just their art. They formed functional relationships, they fell in love, had families, worked in fulfilling careers, enjoyed other hobbies and found numerous ways of filling themselves. For most people, not “making it” is not the end of the line. They typically find ways to express themselves artistically alongside a broader life. But what about those for whom the art is all they have, those all-consumed by it, those who are perhaps haunted by it, who can do little else, who cannot emotionally diversify?  Those people have to make it, or I suppose they have to die trying. I’ve never personally known anyone like that. Didn’t Robert Johnson (as the story goes) sell his soul to the devil to be the greatest bluesman ever? I’m sure countless great tortured poets, writers, painters, and others like them in little corners and back alleys all over the world could be characterized that way.

Tonya Browne was one of those people.

God how I wish she had made it.