Saunders Terrell (October 24, 1911 – March 11, 1986), known as Sonny Terry, was an American Piedmont blues and folk musician who was known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers and occasionally imitations of trains and fox hunts.
Terry was born Saunders Terrell in Greensboro, Georgia. His father, a farmer, taught him to play basic blues harp as a youth. He sustained injuries to his eyes and went blind by the time he was 16, which prevented him from doing farm work, and was forced to play music in order to earn a living. Terry played "Campdown Races" to the plow horses which improved the efficiency of farming in the area.
Realizing his eyesight would keep him from pursuing a profession in farming, Terry decided instead to be a blues singer. He began travelling to nearby Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, performing on street corners for tips. In 1934, he befriended the popular guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. Fuller convinced Terry to move to Durham, where the two immediately gained a strong local following.
By 1937, they were offered an opportunity to go to New York to record for the Vocalion label. A year later, Terry would be back in New York taking part in John Hammond's legendary Spirituals to Swing concert, where he performed one of his memorable tunes, "Mountain Blues." Upon returning to Durham, Terry continued playing regularly with Fuller and also met his future partner, guitarist Brownie McGhee, who would accompany Terry off and on for the next two decades.
In 1938, Terry was invited to play at Carnegie Hall for the first From Spirituals to Swing concert, and later that year he recorded for the Library of Congress. He recorded his first commercial sides in 1940. Some of his most famous works include "Old Jabo", a song about a man bitten by a snake, and "Lost John", which demonstrates his amazing breath control.
Following Fuller's death in 1941, Terry and McGhee moved to New York. The change proved fruitful as they immediately found steady work, playing concerts both as a duo and solo. Despite their fame as "pure" folk artists, in the 1940s Terry and McGhee fronted a jump blues combo with honking saxophone and rolling piano, which was variously billed as Brownie McGhee and his Jook House Rockers or Sonny Terry and his Buckshot Five.
Terry became an in-demand session player who started showing up regularly on the records of folk luminaries including Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. An acting role was also initiated at this time, in the long-running Broadway production of Finian's Rainbow in 1946. Terry & McGhee became well known among white audiences during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. This included collaborations with Styve Homnick, Woody Guthrie and Moses Asch, producing classic recordings for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian/Folkways).
In the early '60s, the duo performed at numerous folk and blues festivals around the world, while Terry found time to work with singer Harry Belafonte and in television commercials. Terry was constantly travelling throughout the '70s, stopping only long enough to write his instructional book The Harp Styles of Sonny Terry.
It was by the mid-'70s, that the strain of being on the road developed into personal problems between McGhee and Terry. Unfortunately, they resigned their long partnership, divided by the bitterness of constant touring. Terry was still being discovered by a younger blues generation via the Johnny Winter-produced album Whoopin' for the Alligator label, featuring Winter and Willie Dixon. Winter had produced a comeback album for Muddy Waters (Hard Again) that helped rejuvenate his career, and he was attempting the same with Terry. By the '80s, Terry's age was catching up with him. He quit recording and only accepted sporadic live appearances.
Terry and McGhee were both recipients of a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.That year's fellowships were the first bestowed by the NEA.
Terry died of natural causes in Mineola, New York in March 1986. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in the same year.
(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)