Life
and career
Early
years
"Big
Bill" was born William Lee Conley Broonzy in
Scott County, Mississippi,
one of Frank Broonzy and Mittie Belcher's 17 children.
Broonzy claimed he was born in 1893, and many sources
report that year. But after his death his twin sist
er
produced a birth certificate giving it as 1898, the
currently accepted date.[2]
Soon after his birth the family moved to
Pine Bluff, Arkansas,
where Bill spent most of his youth. He began playing
music at an early age. At the age of ten he made himself
a
fiddle
from a cigar box and learned how to play
spirituals
and folk songs from his uncle, Jerry Belcher. He and a
friend named Louis Carter, who played a homemade guitar,
began performing at social and church functions.[3]
These early performances included playing at
"two-stages", picnics where whites danced on one side of
the stage and blacks on the other.[4]
In
1915, seventeen-year-old Bill Broonzy had married and
was working his own land as a
sharecropper.
He had decided to give up the fiddle and become a
preacher. There is a story that he was offered fifty
dollars and a new violin if he would play four days at a
local venue. Before he could respond to the offer, his
wife took the money and spent it, so he had to play. In
1916 his crop and stock were wiped out by
drought.
Broonzy went to work in the local coal mine until he was
drafted into the Army in 1917.[5]
Broonzy served two years in Europe during the
first world war.
After his discharge from the Army in 1919, Broonzy
returned for a short time to Arkansas and played clubs
in the
Little Rock
area. As prospects were bleak for a young black man in
the south, Bill, like many others, moved north to
Chicago
in 1920 in search of opportunity.[6]
1920s
After
arriving in
The Windy City,
Broonzy made the switch to
guitar.
He learned guitar from
minstrel
and
medicine show
veteran
Papa Charlie Jackson,
who began recording for
Paramount Records
in 1924.[7]
Through the 1920s Broonzy worked a string of odd jobs,
including
Pullman porter,
cook,
foundry
worker and custodian, to supplement his income, but his
main interest was music. He played regularly at "house
rent" parties and social gatherings, steadily improving
his guitar playing. During this time he wrote one of his
signature tunes, a solo guitar piece called "Saturday
Night Rub".[8]
Thanks to his association with Jackson, Broonzy was able
to get an audition with Paramount executive
J. Mayo Williams.
His initial test
recordings,
made with his friend John Thomas on vocals, were
rejected, but Broonzy persisted, and his second try, a
few months later, was more successful. His first record,
"Big Bill's Blues" backed with "House Rent Stomp",
credited to "Big Bill and Thomps" (Paramount 12656), was
released in 1927. Although the recording was not well
received, Paramount retained their new talent and the
next few years saw more releases by "Big Bill and Thomps".
The records continued to sell poorly. Reviewers
considered his style immature and derivative.[9]
1930s
In
1930 Paramount for the first time used Big Bill's full
name on a recording, "Station Blues". But it was
misspelled as "Big Bill Broomsley". Record sales
continued to be poor, and Broonzy was working at a
grocery store. Broonzy was picked up by
Lester Melrose,
who
produced
acts for various labels including
Champion
and
Gennett Records.
He recorded several sides which were released in the
spring of 1931 under the name "Big Bill Johnson".[10]
In March 1932 he traveled to New York and began
recording for the
American Record Corporation
on their line of less expensive
labels:
(Melotone,
Perfect Records,
et al.).[11]
These recordings sold better and Broonzy began to become
better known. Back in Chicago he was working regularly
in Chicago's
South Side
clubs, and even toured with
Memphis Minnie.[12].
In
1934 Broonzy moved to
Bluebird Records
and began recording with pianist Bob "Black Bob" Call.
His fortunes soon improved. With Black Bob his music was
evolving to a stronger
Rhythm and Blues
sound. His singing sounded more assured and personal. He
began to define his own style, and audiences responded
well. In 1937, he began playing with pianist Josh
Althiemer, recording and performing using a small
instrumental group, including "traps" (drums)
and
acoustic bass
as well as one or more melody instruments (horns and/or
harmonica).
In March 1938 he began recording for
Vocalion Records.[13]
Broonzy's reputation grew and in 1938 he was asked to
fill in for the recently deceased
Robert Johnson
at the
John H. Hammond-produced
From Spirituals to Swing
concert at
Carnegie Hall.
He reprised his performance at the 1939 concert.[14]
Big
Bill Broonzy's own recorded output through the 1930s
only partially reflects his importance to the Chicago
blues scene. His half-brother,
Washboard Sam,
and close friends,
Jazz Gillum,
and
Tampa Red,
also recorded for Bluebird. Broonzy was credited as
composer on many of their most popular recordings of
that time. He reportedly played guitar on most of
Washboard Sam's tracks. Due to his exclusive
arrangements with his own record label, Broonzy was
always careful to have his name only appear on these
artists' records as "composer".[15]
1940s
Despite his successes, Big Bill's audiences were still
small in the 1940s, and he again needed to work outside
music to make ends meet. He supported himself working as
a cook, porter, molder, piano mover, and whatever work
he could find. He still continued to record, moving to
Columbia Records
in 1945. One of his best-known songs, "Key to the
Highway", was written at that time. When the second
American Federation of Musicians
strike ended in 1948, Broonzy was picked up by the
Mercury
label, for whom he made a handful of records.[16]
1950s
At
the start of the 1950s, Broonzy's career seemed to be at
a standstill, and he considered giving up the music
business. But he had become part of a touring
folk music
revue formed by
Win Stracke
called
I Come for to Sing,
which also included
Studs Terkel
and
William Lane.
Terkel called him the key figure in this group.[17]
The group had some success thanks to the emerging
folk revival
movement. The exposure made it possible for Bill to tour
Europe in 1951.
In
Europe Big Bill Broonzy was greeted with
standing ovations
and critical praise wherever he played. The tour marked
a turning point in his fortunes, and when he returned to
the United States he was a featured act with many
prominent folk artists such as
Pete Seeger,
Sonny Terry
and
Brownie McGhee,
and
Leadbelly.
From 1953 on his financial position became more secure
and he was able to live quite well on his music
earnings. Broonzy returned to his
solo
folk-blues
roots, and traveled and recorded extensively.[18]
In
1953, Dr. Vera (King) Morkovin and
Studs Terkel
brought Big Bill to
Circle Pines Center,
a cooperative year-round camp in
Hastings, Michigan,
where he was employed as the summer camp cook. Bill
worked there in the summer from '53-'56. On July 4,
1954,
Pete Seeger
traveled to Circle Pines and gave a concert with Bill on
the farmhouse lawn, which was recorded by Seeger for the
new fine arts radio station in Chicago,
WFMT-FM.
That tape today reveals a blues singer who also sang the
popular music of the day with a powerful voice and a
magnificent guitar style.[19]
In
1955, with the assistance of Danish writer Yannick
Bruynoghe, Broonzy published his
autobiography
entitled Big Bill Blues.[20]
He toured worldwide to Africa, South America, the
Pacific region and across
Europe
into early 1956. In 1957 Broonzy was one of the founding
faculty members of the
Old Town School of Folk Music.
At the school's opening night on December 1, he taught a
class his song "The Glory of Love".[21]
By
1958 Big Bill was suffering from the effects of
throat cancer.
Broonzy died August 15, 1958, and is buried in
Lincoln Cemetery,
Blue Island, Illinois.[22]
Style
and influence
Broonzy's own influences included the spirituals,
ragtime
music,
hokum
and country blues he heard growing up, and the styles of
his contemporaries, including
Jimmie Rodgers,
Blind Blake,
Son House,
and
Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Broonzy combined all these influences into his own style
of the blues that foreshadowed the post-war
Chicago blues
sound, later refined and popularized by artists such as
Muddy Waters
and
Willie Dixon.[23]
Although he had been a pioneer of the
Chicago blues
style and had employed electric instruments as early as
1942, his new, white audiences wanted to hear him
playing his earliest songs accompanied only by his own
acoustic guitar,
since this was considered to be more "authentic".
A
considerable part of his early ARC/CBS recordings have
been reissued in anthology collections by CBS-Sony, and
other earlier recordings have been collected on blues
reissue labels, as have his later European and Chicago
recordings of the fifties.
Since
Broonzy was never a spectacular electric guitarist in
the manner of others of his early-1950s contemporaries,
he is not as well known as others of that period, and
was not extensively covered during the "British
Blues Revival"
of the 1960s; however, he did gain some popularity, with
"Key to the Highway" featured on
Derek and the Dominos'
album,
Layla and Other Assorted Love
Songs. He
was an acclaimed acoustic guitar player, and a major
source of inspiration to men like Muddy Waters,
Memphis Slim,
and
Ray Davies.
In
Q Magazine
(September 2007) it is reported that
Ronnie Wood
of
The Rolling Stones
claims that Bill Broonzy's track, "Guitar Shuffle", is
his favorite guitar music. Wood said, "It was one of the
first tracks I learnt to play, but even to this day I
can't play it exactly right".
Broonzy
recorded over 350 compositions.
Honors
He
was inducted into the
Gennett Records
Walk of Fame in
Richmond, Indiana
in 2007.
Discography
- "Big
Bill's Blues" b/w "House Rent Stomp" (Paramount
12656) 1927
- "Down
in the Basement Blues" b/w "The Starvation Blues"
(Paramount 12707) 1928
-
"Station Blues" b/w "How You Want It Done"
(Paramount 13084) 1930
- "Big
Bill Blues" (Champion 16400) 1931
- "Take
Your Hands Off Her" b/w "The Sun's Gonna Shine In My
Back Door Someday" (Bluebird 6188) 1935
