Paul Brown
As a newscaster and reporter for NPR, Paul Brown handles an ever-changing combination of on-air, reporting, editing and producing tasks with skills he developed over 30 years working in radio and print journalism.
A general assignment newscast journalist with a world beat, Brown reports on breaking news, ongoing stories, and the broad range of issues that make up each newscast. His tools include phone interviews, on-scene reporting, and research. He files produced reports (called "spots") and engages in live on-air discussions with newscasters.
Brown's role in the Newscast unit has evolved from news anchor with some reporting responsibilities to a reporter filling in for newscasters on leave. Brown was NPR's executive producer for weekend programming from 2001 to 2003. He served temporary stints as executive producer and senior producer of NPR's Talk of the Nation, and as senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition.
Before joining NPR fulltime in 2001, Brown worked as a freelance reporter and music producer. Prior to that, he spent nearly 13 years at NPR member station WFDD in Winston-Salem, NC as production manager, news director, and program director. He filed reports regularly for NPR on topics ranging from business to politics to cultural affairs. He produced and hosted a popular Southern culture and music program.
Brown won a National Federation of Community Broadcasters Silver Reel Award for his NPR music documentary "Breaking Up Christmas: A Blue Ridge Mountain Holiday." He won an AP Enterprise Reporting award for his coverage of the changing lives of tobacco factory workers at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In 2000, he was the sound recording engineer for the Preserving Living Traditions project in Tibet, which documented music and disappearing languages.
A banjo, guitar and fiddle player, Brown has documented traditional music in southwestern Virginia and northwest North Carolina. He continues to record and document music, produce albums, and present and teach traditional music in programs featuring its historical and cultural contexts. He was executive editor and presenter of the 2003 series "Honky Tonks, Hymns & the Blues" on NPR's Morning Edition.
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More than 30 people are killed in blasts targeting U.S. military convoys in the Baghdad area. A car bombing outside the mayor's office in the Abu Ghraib area, west of Baghdad, kills two Iraqis and one U.S. soldier. In Fallujah, three Iraqis are reported killed in a U.S. air strike. Hear NPR's Paul Brown.
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In Part 10 of our series on the roots of American country music, NPR's Paul Brown tells the story of Bob Wills. The fiddler grew up in a family of fiddlers in the cultural mixing bowl of the American southwest. He went on to lead a band that mixed breakdowns, big band swing, blues and square dance music — a style that came to be called Western swing.
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In the latest installment of the series "Honky Tonk, Hymns and the Blues," NPR's Paul Brown explores the origins of the country fiddle — from Eck Robertson to the very word, "fiddle." Paul also explains why it's called "the Devil's box."
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In part eight of the series Honky Tonks, Hymns, and the Blues, NPR's Paul Brown explains the way the accordion came to the American southwest in the hands of German immigrants and caught the ears of local Tex Mex musicians.
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Paul Brown continues the weekly series "Honky Tonks, Hymns, and the Blues," with a profile of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, a group that influenced the sound and showmanship of country and western music during the 1940s and '50s. The Maddox family migrated from Alabama to California in the 1930s, picked cotton and fruit crops up and down the West Coast, and performed at migrant labor camps. Their sound was an early model for Rockabilly music.
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In the latest segment in the "Honky Tonks, Hymns and the Blues" series, NPR's Paul Brown explores the influence of Jimmie Rodgers. The "father of country music" traveled like a meteor from obscurity, to fame, to early death. Combining blues, vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley with old-time mountain music, he brought the so-called "hillbilly" sound into the mainstream.
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NPR's Paul Brown traces country blues back to its origins among sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. It's part of "Honky Tonks, Hymns and the Blues," a special 11-part weekly series, airing Fridays on Morning Edition, highlighting the creation of American musical traditions.
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A special 11-part weekly series, airing Fridays on Morning Edition, highlights the creation of the American musical traditions that give this country its own unique sound. In the second part, NPR's Paul Brown reports on the origins of the country guitar and how an instrument of the upper crust made it to the hills.
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Bill Monroe first recorded Blue Moon of Kentucky in 1946, and it immediately connected with country listeners. -
Earl Scruggs's song may have been the first to introduce audiences to bluegrass music.
