BROWNIE MCGHEE, 80, SANG PIEDMONT BLUES.

Byline: Jon Pareles The New York Times

Brownie McGhee, the blues guitarist and singer who brought finger-picking Piedmont blues to an international audience, died Friday at Summit Hospital in Oakland, Calif., where he lived. The cause was stomach cancer, said his daughter, Vilhelmina McGhee. He was 80.

In a long-running partnership with harmonica player Sonny Terry, who died in 1986, McGhee preserved and popularized the blues style of the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. Piedmont blues meshes bouncy guitar picking and strumming with rhythmic, hooting harmonica; McGhee's intricate parts combined bass lines, chords and countermelodies while he sang with earthy conviction. He and Terry were major figures in the folk revival of the late 1950s and early '60s, performing everywhere from protest rallies to Broadway. And while McGhee was best known for Piedmont blues, he also worked in styles from gospel to rhythm-and-blues.

Walter Brown McGhee was born in 1915 in Knoxville, Tenn., and learned guitar from his father. He performed in churches, carnivals, medicine shows, minstrel troupes and the Golden Voices Gospel Quartet, and as a traveling bluesman. He was strongly influenced by Blind Boy Fuller, and he made his way to Fuller's home in Durham, N.C. There he met Terry, who was working on the streets with Fuller; he also met J.B. Long, the talent scout who had discovered Fuller. Long arranged McGhee's first recording session, a remake of a Fuller song, in 1940; a year later, when Fuller died, McGhee recorded "The Death of Blind Boy Fuller," using Fuller's guitar and credited as Blind Boy Fuller No. 2.

McGhee played his first engagement with Terry in 1942, at a civil rights benefit organized by Paul Robeson. After a year apart, they met again in New York in 1944 and made their first recording together. They became a part of the left-wing New York folk scene of the 1940s, living in the communal house of the Almanac Singers and working as a trio with Woody Guthrie.

When Terry joined the cast of "Finian's Rainbow" in 1947, McGhee formed a six-piece band, Brownie McGhee and His Mighty Rockers. In 1948 he started a blues school in Harlem. He also worked as a studio musician, backing up Big Maybelle, Champion Jack Dupree and his brother, Stick McGhee, whom he backed on the 1949 hit song "Drinkin' Wine Spo-dee-o-dee."

McGhee and Terry worked together sporadically in the early 1950s, and in 1955 they began a three-year Broadway engagement in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." They began a steady recording career as a duo with a 1957 session for Fantasy Records that yielded two albums of blues and one of spirituals. Embraced by the folk audience, the duo became a steady draw on the college and coffeehouse circuit.

The duo returned to Broadway in Langston Hughes' "Simply Heaven," but spent most of their time steadily touring the folk circuit in the United States and Europe. They broke up in the late 1970s, and McGhee continued to perform infrequently on his own.