A contemporary of blues greats Blind Blake, Tampa Red, and Papa
Charlie Jackson, Chicago blues artist William "Big Bill" Broonzy
influenced an array of postwar musicians, including Muddy Waters,
Memphis Slim, and J. B. Lenoir. In Blue Smoke, Roger House tells the
extraordinary story of "Big Bill," a working-class bluesman whose
circumstances offer a window into the dramatic social transformations
faced by African Americans during the first half of the twentieth
century.
One in a family of twenty-one children and reared by
sharecropper parents in Mississippi, Broonzy seemed destined to stay on
the land. He moved to Arkansas to work as a sharecropper, preacher, and
fiddle player, but the army drafted him during World War I. After his
service abroad, Broonzy, like thousands of other black soldiers,
returned to the racism and bleak economic prospects of the Jim Crow
South and chose to move North to seek new opportunities. After learning
to play the guitar, he performed at neighborhood parties in Chicago and
in 1927 attracted the attention of Paramount Records, which released his
first single, "House Rent Stomp," backed by "Big Bill's Blues."
Over
the following decades, Broonzy toured the United States and Europe. He
released dozens of records but was never quite successful enough to give
up working as a manual laborer. Many of his songs reflect this
experience as a blue-collar worker, articulating the struggles,
determination, and optimism of the urban black working class. Before his
death in 1958, Broonzy finally achieved crossover success as a key
player in the folk revival movement led by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax,
and as a blues ambassador to British musicians such as Lonnie Donegan
and Eric Clapton.
Weaving Broonzy's recordings, writings, and
interviews into a compelling narrative of his life, Blue Smoke offers a
comprehensive portrait of an artist recognized today as one of the most
prolific and influential working-class blues musicians of the era.
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