Big Bill Broonzy was the royal ambassador of the blues in his day, setting a precedent for the expansive pathways later charted by B.B. King. Broonzy was one of the most prolific recording artists of the 1930s and ‘40s, a well-known figure among African-American audiences before he crossed over to the white folk audience in the 1950s. He was the first blues guitarist to play at Carnegie Hall in the legendary Spirituals to Swing concert in 1938 – chosen to replace Robert Johnson, who had died a few months before the show. In the 1950s, Broonzy took his blues to Europe and gave many audiences there their first chance to see an authentic American bluesman. A songwriter and session musician of note, he was also a master storyteller and author of Big Bill Blues>, the first book written by a blues singer. Although he became known in the ‘50s for the folk-blues style he had adapted for his new audiences, he was a formidable guitar picker in his younger days and an artist whose vocals, lyrics, and arrangements kept his music viable in the commercial jukebox blues market until a new postwar generation took over the blues. And Broonzy was acknowleged for his help in bringing the newcomers along; one of the most famous photos of Broonzy shows him shaking hands with a young admirer named Muddy Waters in Chicago. Despite his acknowledged stature in the blues world, Broonzy said that, until his last few years, he never a livin made a living from his music alone and always held one day job or another.
While Big Bill’s musical accomplishments cannot be questioned, the published details of his biography need revision. Bill always claimed that he was born in Scott, Mississippi, on June 26, 1893. But Broonzy historian Robert Riesman talked to family members in Arkansas and researched piles of documents, and from his work it appears that Bill was in Lake Dick, Arkansas, in 1903, never lived in Mississippi, and chose the surname Broonzy over the name he was born with, Lee Conley Bradley. The reasons are up for speculation, but at any rate Broonzy did a fine job in his stories and songs of connecting the blues with Mississippi and with the African-American experience, and in fact is honored with a historical marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in Scott. Big Bill died in Chicago on Aug. 15, 1958.
–Jim O’Neal
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www.msbluestrail.org