 |
| Later days, I'm guessing. |
“’He treated his life story as a set of fluid possibilities, as opposed to fixed events,’ Riesman says. ‘And his imaginative powers were formidable. As Studs Terkel said, “Bill is telling the truth — his truth.”’”
- National Public Radio retrospective, 2011
In other words, everything I’m about to tell you about Big Bill Broonzy could be a lie, but at least it’s a good one. There’s a main narrative, then a counter-narrative reconstructed by Broonzy’s biographer Bob Riesman, who most sources quote extensively. Also, most of them misspell Riesman’s name as "Reisman." The ground is thin, in other words, but let’s walk it anyway.
The man who became Big Bill Broonzy was born somewhere between 1893 and 1903. Some sources insert “Broonzy” as a final surname, some don’t, but they all agree on some variation on Lee Conley Bradley for a birth name, while also generally agreeing he did not have a twin sister (Laney, by name). Other stories from his early life - e.g., serving in World War I (of which, I’m still on maybe), and moving to the Mississippi Delta region during a flood, etc. - are generally read as thoughts he borrowed to serve as memories of his own; a site called broonzy.com pushes that line the hardest. One story supported by two sources claims he made a fiddle from a cigar box as a teenager and played picnics with a young guitarist named Louise Carter - segregated picnics, according to Wikipedia. In a fun twist, a couple sources say Broonzy learned to play his improvised fiddle from an uncle named Jerry Belcher, a man Riesman doesn’t think ever existed. Now, moving on to things that most sources agree on…
Big Bill Broonzy did start on the fiddle. There’s also general agreement that he left music behind, married, and worked as a sharecropper in the fields around Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The story of how he got back into music starts 1) with something his wife, Gertrude, did and 2) makes most sense in the context of him serving in World War I. Sometime before the Great War, but also after or during a drought that devastated his farming plot, someone offered Broonzy $50, a new violin and $14 dollars in tips to perform at a three-day picnic(!?); the sources that mention the story agree that Gertrude spent the money before he got his advance, which forced him to play the picnic. A site called culturalequity.org fleshed out that story the best, while also noting a period of inactivity from (circa) 1918 to Broonzy moving to Chicago in 1920 - and without a wife. So, again, I’m inclined to accept that Broonzy might have served in Europe (also, culturalequity felt like the best source; read that in full for the most thorough history).
Seeing that Chicago didn’t have a big market for fiddlers, Broonzy picked up the guitar. As he worked to get up to speed, he held a variety of day jobs - as a cook, at a foundry, as a custodian or as a Pullman porter (a good gig for black Americans at the time, apparently) - and turned to a veteran of the minstrel/medicine show stage named Papa Charlie Jackson to teach him guitar. His apprenticeship lasted from 1921-23 at a minimum, but he developed enough to find work playing “social gatherings” and “rent parties” (a fun, if precarious way to pay rent) throughout the 1920s.
Jackson connected him with J. Mayo Williams at Paramount - the label's "point man" for blues artists - who agreed to record him starting in the late 1920s (Wikipedia does best with the time-line). He brought a friend to his first sessions - a vocalist named John Thomas - and they recorded as Big Bill and Thomps. Their first attempts got rejected, but they persisted and released the singles “Big Bill Blues” and “House Rent Stomp” in 1927. That single sold like shit, much like everything Broonzy (et. al.) recorded from that date until somewhere around 1934. Some of that was down to Great Depression, which, again, damn near KO-ed the record industry. Like Tampa Red (already covered in this series), who later became a friend, Broonzy kept recording through the early ‘30s, sometimes under different names - e.g,. “Alabama Strut” as “Big Bill Johnson” in 1931 (fwiw, searches for that song only turn up "Pig Meat Strut," so...). All those recordings may not have sold, but they did punch a ticket to travel to New York City and record several songs for American Record Corporation’s budget labels - e.g., Melotone and Perfect Records (he would record for half a dozen more labels). This was Broonzy doing the work and picking up steam…
“The end of prohibition in 1933 also made it possible for him to perform in taverns and clubs. For much of his career, however, he continued to have day jobs, often as a custodian.”
That comes from culturalequity and it feels like both like a continuation and a pivot - i.e., Broonzy started playing with “better” musicians (which, here, means they had a better idea of what they wanted to do), but he also continued working those day jobs. The name-drops pile up into babble at this point - e.g., Wikipedia says he played with a pianist named Bob “Black Bob” Call while culturalequity goes with “Black Bob” Hudson. All sources agree, however, that Broonzy started working in the “small group” format typical of Chicago blues - that is a band featuring a singer, a guitarist, bass, drums and sometimes piano and horns. Through the mid-1930s, he fronted a group called Big Bill Broonzy’s Memphis Five and established relationships with a succession of pianists - Joshua Altheimer replaced Hudson (or Call), Memphis Slim replaced Altheimer and so on.
All that was part of the same “big break” of Broonzy becoming something like a combination session musician and composer for RCA’s Bluebird label. From Wikipedia:
“Broonzy was credited as the composer of many of their most popular recordings of that time. He reportedly played guitar on most of Washboard Sam's tracks. Because of his exclusive arrangements with his record label, Broonzy was careful to allow his name to appear on these artists' records only as a composer.”
The tail-end of the same period saw another “breakthrough” opportunity land in his lap that came at the proverbial crossroads of the blues. In December of 1938, a record producer named John Hammond organized a performance at Carnegie Hall to celebrate blues and folk music. Hammond tried and failed to recruit the legendary Robert Johnson for the event, only to discover Johnson had been murdered the week before he found him. Titled From Spirituals to Swing and featuring a literal all-star line-up - e.g., Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Helen Humes, Meade Lux Lewis, Mitchell's Christian Singers, the Golden Gate Quartet, James P. Johnson, and Sonny Terry - the show sought to lay out “the development of African-American music from rural blues and gospel styles to more classically influenced urban jazz.” Broonzy chose a song titled “It Was Just a Dream” for the occasion, a political tract that wouldn’t be his last. In a twist that isn't really a twist, Hammond struggled to find mainstream sponsors - it took a Marxist media outlet called New Masses to fund it because the NAACP wouldn't touch it - but the 1938 performance and a follow-up edition a year later introduced Broonzy to white audiences and opened some more doors. Still, not even an appearance at a swing-inspired spin on A Midsummer Night’s Dream called Swingin’ the Dream (featuring Louis Armstrong as Bottom) freed him from holding day-jobs. Arguably related, the show bombed...
Moving on to the 1940s:
“Broonzy expanded his work during the 1940s as he honed his songwriting skills, which showed a knack for appealing to his more sophisticated city audience as well as people that shared his country roots. His work in this period shows he performed across a wider musical spectrum than almost any other bluesman before or since, including in his repertoire ragtime, hokum blues, country blues, urban blues, jazz-tinged songs, folk songs and spirituals.”
The years after World War II saw Broonzy record some of his most popular songs - e.g., “Where the Blues Began*,” “Martha Blues” and “Key to the Highway,” nearly all of them before 1950. He probably got an even bigger boost when he returned to New York to play a “hootenanny” arranged by People’s Songs in New York and performed a song called “Black, Brown, and White” (sometimes also titled “Get Back”). The song’s lyrics don’t mess around:
“This little song that I'm singing about/
People you all know it's true/
If you're black and gotta work for a living/
This is what they will say to you/
They says, ‘If you're white, you're all right/
If you're brown, stick around/
But if you're black, oh brother,/
Get back, get back get back."
That blunt message complicated Broonzy’s attempts to get that song recorded, but 1951 saw his fortunes finally and truly turn around. The New York “hootenannies” connected him to the folk revival of the early 1950s, but also to artists like Pete Seeger and culture whisperers like Studs Terkel. It was the latter who helped Broonzy find steady (again, custodial) work at the University of Iowa starting in 1951, but who also pulled him into a show he put together with a guy named Win Starke titled, I Come for to Sing. That show would become a staple at Chicago’s Blue Note jazz club and finally give Broonzy stable income as a musician. It also drew the attention of a French jazz critic named Hugues Panassie, who arranged a European tour - and those tours kept coming throught the first half of the ‘50s. After years of small-group performance, he returned to his Delta blues roots during this period; the short version, he heard Muddy Waters and decided to stop trying to keep up. Still, he earned critical acclaim and standing ovations everywhere he played. Whatever he could or couldn’t do, Broonzy introduced most of Europe to the blues - England, in particular, where he inspired future legends like Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.
Broonzy remained popular, respected and in demand with black and white audiences through most of the 1950s. It all came to an abrupt stop with a throat cancer diagnosis in 1957. He continued to play into 1958, playing guitar when he could no longer sing, until he died on August 15 of that year. His (alleged) life as a fantasist didn’t seem to damage his reputation all that much. For his funeral, he deliberately arranged to have the pallbearers divided equally between black and white, and included Muddy Waters, Tampa Red, Studs Terkel and Chicago folk legend Win Stracke. Muddy Waters later called him “the nicest man I met in my life,” and gives Broonzy a lot of credit for launching his career. More kind words greeted his passing, but I don’t think any of them improved on the epitaph Big Bill Broonzy wrote for himself:
“When you write about me please don't say I'm a jazz musician. Don't say I'm a musician or a guitar player - just write Big Bill was a well-known blues singer and player and has recorded 260 blues songs from 1925 up till 1952; he was a happy man when he was drunk and playing with women; he was liked by all the blues singers.”
About the Sampler
I already flagged a number of songs on the sampler up above (and added a few I didn’t). Instead of continuing my habit of diving blind, I focused on a two album series on Spotify that featured Big Bill Broonzy’s most famous songs on either side of World War II - something that gives the listener a good taste of how much his sound developed. I scrambled them in the sampler, but, to lay out the material by collection:
Vol. 1: Pre-War Years: “Saturday Night Rub” (the first song he wrote, btw), “Too Too Train Blues,” "Long Tall Mama,” “Mississippi River Blues*,” “Horny Frog*,” and "You Got to Hit the Right Lick*.”
All that material sounds like old-school blues - i.e., a dude on a guitar, handling the bass and melody all on his lonesome. (* I put asterisks next to all the songs from that collection that has piano accompanying Big Bill, even up above...to finally explain that.) Next:
Vol. 2, the Post-War Years: “All By Myself,” “Roll Them Bones,” “Just Rocking,” “Rambling Bill,” “Five Feet Seven,” “Mindin’ Own Business,” “Hey Hey,” and “John Henry.”
I unconsciously over-selected for “more blues, but, boy, has recording improved,” but you’ll hear the full-band set up/composition on some of those numbers - e.g., “Just Rocking” and “Rambling Bill,” but also “Roll Them Bones,” which sounds close enough to a rock-‘n’-roll number to qualify in my book. Even after controlling for the fact that Big Bill Broonzy's career stretched into the 1950s, the series gets closer to rock 'n' roll with every chapter...if after a massive, perhaps years-long, digression. Just stick a pin it.
Till the next one…see you at the crossroads, and bring yer soul...
- National Public Radio retrospective, 2011
In other words, everything I’m about to tell you about Big Bill Broonzy could be a lie, but at least it’s a good one. There’s a main narrative, then a counter-narrative reconstructed by Broonzy’s biographer Bob Riesman, who most sources quote extensively. Also, most of them misspell Riesman’s name as "Reisman." The ground is thin, in other words, but let’s walk it anyway.
The man who became Big Bill Broonzy was born somewhere between 1893 and 1903. Some sources insert “Broonzy” as a final surname, some don’t, but they all agree on some variation on Lee Conley Bradley for a birth name, while also generally agreeing he did not have a twin sister (Laney, by name). Other stories from his early life - e.g., serving in World War I (of which, I’m still on maybe), and moving to the Mississippi Delta region during a flood, etc. - are generally read as thoughts he borrowed to serve as memories of his own; a site called broonzy.com pushes that line the hardest. One story supported by two sources claims he made a fiddle from a cigar box as a teenager and played picnics with a young guitarist named Louise Carter - segregated picnics, according to Wikipedia. In a fun twist, a couple sources say Broonzy learned to play his improvised fiddle from an uncle named Jerry Belcher, a man Riesman doesn’t think ever existed. Now, moving on to things that most sources agree on…
Big Bill Broonzy did start on the fiddle. There’s also general agreement that he left music behind, married, and worked as a sharecropper in the fields around Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The story of how he got back into music starts 1) with something his wife, Gertrude, did and 2) makes most sense in the context of him serving in World War I. Sometime before the Great War, but also after or during a drought that devastated his farming plot, someone offered Broonzy $50, a new violin and $14 dollars in tips to perform at a three-day picnic(!?); the sources that mention the story agree that Gertrude spent the money before he got his advance, which forced him to play the picnic. A site called culturalequity.org fleshed out that story the best, while also noting a period of inactivity from (circa) 1918 to Broonzy moving to Chicago in 1920 - and without a wife. So, again, I’m inclined to accept that Broonzy might have served in Europe (also, culturalequity felt like the best source; read that in full for the most thorough history).
Seeing that Chicago didn’t have a big market for fiddlers, Broonzy picked up the guitar. As he worked to get up to speed, he held a variety of day jobs - as a cook, at a foundry, as a custodian or as a Pullman porter (a good gig for black Americans at the time, apparently) - and turned to a veteran of the minstrel/medicine show stage named Papa Charlie Jackson to teach him guitar. His apprenticeship lasted from 1921-23 at a minimum, but he developed enough to find work playing “social gatherings” and “rent parties” (a fun, if precarious way to pay rent) throughout the 1920s.
Jackson connected him with J. Mayo Williams at Paramount - the label's "point man" for blues artists - who agreed to record him starting in the late 1920s (Wikipedia does best with the time-line). He brought a friend to his first sessions - a vocalist named John Thomas - and they recorded as Big Bill and Thomps. Their first attempts got rejected, but they persisted and released the singles “Big Bill Blues” and “House Rent Stomp” in 1927. That single sold like shit, much like everything Broonzy (et. al.) recorded from that date until somewhere around 1934. Some of that was down to Great Depression, which, again, damn near KO-ed the record industry. Like Tampa Red (already covered in this series), who later became a friend, Broonzy kept recording through the early ‘30s, sometimes under different names - e.g,. “Alabama Strut” as “Big Bill Johnson” in 1931 (fwiw, searches for that song only turn up "Pig Meat Strut," so...). All those recordings may not have sold, but they did punch a ticket to travel to New York City and record several songs for American Record Corporation’s budget labels - e.g., Melotone and Perfect Records (he would record for half a dozen more labels). This was Broonzy doing the work and picking up steam…
“The end of prohibition in 1933 also made it possible for him to perform in taverns and clubs. For much of his career, however, he continued to have day jobs, often as a custodian.”
That comes from culturalequity and it feels like both like a continuation and a pivot - i.e., Broonzy started playing with “better” musicians (which, here, means they had a better idea of what they wanted to do), but he also continued working those day jobs. The name-drops pile up into babble at this point - e.g., Wikipedia says he played with a pianist named Bob “Black Bob” Call while culturalequity goes with “Black Bob” Hudson. All sources agree, however, that Broonzy started working in the “small group” format typical of Chicago blues - that is a band featuring a singer, a guitarist, bass, drums and sometimes piano and horns. Through the mid-1930s, he fronted a group called Big Bill Broonzy’s Memphis Five and established relationships with a succession of pianists - Joshua Altheimer replaced Hudson (or Call), Memphis Slim replaced Altheimer and so on.
All that was part of the same “big break” of Broonzy becoming something like a combination session musician and composer for RCA’s Bluebird label. From Wikipedia:
“Broonzy was credited as the composer of many of their most popular recordings of that time. He reportedly played guitar on most of Washboard Sam's tracks. Because of his exclusive arrangements with his record label, Broonzy was careful to allow his name to appear on these artists' records only as a composer.”
The tail-end of the same period saw another “breakthrough” opportunity land in his lap that came at the proverbial crossroads of the blues. In December of 1938, a record producer named John Hammond organized a performance at Carnegie Hall to celebrate blues and folk music. Hammond tried and failed to recruit the legendary Robert Johnson for the event, only to discover Johnson had been murdered the week before he found him. Titled From Spirituals to Swing and featuring a literal all-star line-up - e.g., Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Helen Humes, Meade Lux Lewis, Mitchell's Christian Singers, the Golden Gate Quartet, James P. Johnson, and Sonny Terry - the show sought to lay out “the development of African-American music from rural blues and gospel styles to more classically influenced urban jazz.” Broonzy chose a song titled “It Was Just a Dream” for the occasion, a political tract that wouldn’t be his last. In a twist that isn't really a twist, Hammond struggled to find mainstream sponsors - it took a Marxist media outlet called New Masses to fund it because the NAACP wouldn't touch it - but the 1938 performance and a follow-up edition a year later introduced Broonzy to white audiences and opened some more doors. Still, not even an appearance at a swing-inspired spin on A Midsummer Night’s Dream called Swingin’ the Dream (featuring Louis Armstrong as Bottom) freed him from holding day-jobs. Arguably related, the show bombed...
Moving on to the 1940s:
“Broonzy expanded his work during the 1940s as he honed his songwriting skills, which showed a knack for appealing to his more sophisticated city audience as well as people that shared his country roots. His work in this period shows he performed across a wider musical spectrum than almost any other bluesman before or since, including in his repertoire ragtime, hokum blues, country blues, urban blues, jazz-tinged songs, folk songs and spirituals.”
The years after World War II saw Broonzy record some of his most popular songs - e.g., “Where the Blues Began*,” “Martha Blues” and “Key to the Highway,” nearly all of them before 1950. He probably got an even bigger boost when he returned to New York to play a “hootenanny” arranged by People’s Songs in New York and performed a song called “Black, Brown, and White” (sometimes also titled “Get Back”). The song’s lyrics don’t mess around:
“This little song that I'm singing about/
People you all know it's true/
If you're black and gotta work for a living/
This is what they will say to you/
They says, ‘If you're white, you're all right/
If you're brown, stick around/
But if you're black, oh brother,/
Get back, get back get back."
That blunt message complicated Broonzy’s attempts to get that song recorded, but 1951 saw his fortunes finally and truly turn around. The New York “hootenannies” connected him to the folk revival of the early 1950s, but also to artists like Pete Seeger and culture whisperers like Studs Terkel. It was the latter who helped Broonzy find steady (again, custodial) work at the University of Iowa starting in 1951, but who also pulled him into a show he put together with a guy named Win Starke titled, I Come for to Sing. That show would become a staple at Chicago’s Blue Note jazz club and finally give Broonzy stable income as a musician. It also drew the attention of a French jazz critic named Hugues Panassie, who arranged a European tour - and those tours kept coming throught the first half of the ‘50s. After years of small-group performance, he returned to his Delta blues roots during this period; the short version, he heard Muddy Waters and decided to stop trying to keep up. Still, he earned critical acclaim and standing ovations everywhere he played. Whatever he could or couldn’t do, Broonzy introduced most of Europe to the blues - England, in particular, where he inspired future legends like Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.
Broonzy remained popular, respected and in demand with black and white audiences through most of the 1950s. It all came to an abrupt stop with a throat cancer diagnosis in 1957. He continued to play into 1958, playing guitar when he could no longer sing, until he died on August 15 of that year. His (alleged) life as a fantasist didn’t seem to damage his reputation all that much. For his funeral, he deliberately arranged to have the pallbearers divided equally between black and white, and included Muddy Waters, Tampa Red, Studs Terkel and Chicago folk legend Win Stracke. Muddy Waters later called him “the nicest man I met in my life,” and gives Broonzy a lot of credit for launching his career. More kind words greeted his passing, but I don’t think any of them improved on the epitaph Big Bill Broonzy wrote for himself:
“When you write about me please don't say I'm a jazz musician. Don't say I'm a musician or a guitar player - just write Big Bill was a well-known blues singer and player and has recorded 260 blues songs from 1925 up till 1952; he was a happy man when he was drunk and playing with women; he was liked by all the blues singers.”
About the Sampler
I already flagged a number of songs on the sampler up above (and added a few I didn’t). Instead of continuing my habit of diving blind, I focused on a two album series on Spotify that featured Big Bill Broonzy’s most famous songs on either side of World War II - something that gives the listener a good taste of how much his sound developed. I scrambled them in the sampler, but, to lay out the material by collection:
Vol. 1: Pre-War Years: “Saturday Night Rub” (the first song he wrote, btw), “Too Too Train Blues,” "Long Tall Mama,” “Mississippi River Blues*,” “Horny Frog*,” and "You Got to Hit the Right Lick*.”
All that material sounds like old-school blues - i.e., a dude on a guitar, handling the bass and melody all on his lonesome. (* I put asterisks next to all the songs from that collection that has piano accompanying Big Bill, even up above...to finally explain that.) Next:
Vol. 2, the Post-War Years: “All By Myself,” “Roll Them Bones,” “Just Rocking,” “Rambling Bill,” “Five Feet Seven,” “Mindin’ Own Business,” “Hey Hey,” and “John Henry.”
I unconsciously over-selected for “more blues, but, boy, has recording improved,” but you’ll hear the full-band set up/composition on some of those numbers - e.g., “Just Rocking” and “Rambling Bill,” but also “Roll Them Bones,” which sounds close enough to a rock-‘n’-roll number to qualify in my book. Even after controlling for the fact that Big Bill Broonzy's career stretched into the 1950s, the series gets closer to rock 'n' roll with every chapter...if after a massive, perhaps years-long, digression. Just stick a pin it.
Till the next one…see you at the crossroads, and bring yer soul...
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