The two soon began playing together as a guitar-harmonica duo, like the best-known modern Piedmont players, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, whose careers stretched from the '40s to the '60s.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, several hundred young people had formed what they called an "indefinite street party" in a central square, where the blogger Aleksei Navalny called for "guitars, harmonicas, harps, trombones and drums".
It has long been a place for itinerant hippies and drug users from all over to stop for a while, and, on a two-block stretch, one could run into musicians playing guitars, harmonicas, an accordion, even plastic pails.
Unlike Trinidadian calypso groups, the Talbot Brothers did not use percussion, except for an occasional conga drum, and their instrumentation was unusual: a blend of acoustic and electric guitars, harmonicas, a 10-string ukulele called a tiple, an accordion and Roy's booming bass.
They earned a formidable reputation as a live act, developing frantic improvised guitar-harmonica "rave-ups", but they enjoyed only modest success with singles based on R&B covers.
