Harry C. Browne
American actor and singer (1878-1954)
Harry Clinton Browne (August 18, 1878 – November 15, 1954) was an American banjo player, actor, and religious leader, who appeared on stage and in silent films and recorded for Columbia Records in the 1910s and 1920s.
Biography
Browne was born on August 18, 1878, in North Adams, Massachusetts to Isaac Snell Browne and Elizabeth Tobin. He married Edith Elizabeth Jackson on November 7, 1900, and the couple had one adopted daughter, Jane Elizabeth Browne. Before his acting career, he served in the Second Massachusetts U.S. Volunteers during the Spanish–American War and had a brief career campaigning for the Democratic Party. William Jennings Bryan, then the Secretary of State, offered Browne a diplomatic position in February 1914 but the latter declined. Browne later worked for a stock company as an actor, casting him in plays such as Arizona and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in the early 1900s.
A skilled banjo player, Browne performed in vaudeville for seven years before recording a series of songs for Columbia Records, starting in 1916. His first record, perhaps his most well-known, is a re-interpretation of the American folk song "Turkey in the Straw". Released in March 1916, Browne appropriated the standard as a coon song, re-titled it "Nigger Love a Watermelon, Ha! Ha!
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29052493. VIAF identifies the subject as 33787054. The Library of Congress control number is n99017318. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1878, 1954, 1900 and 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harry C. Browne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.