Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,835

This is the grave of Big Bill Broonzy.

Born possibly in 1893, but also possibly in 1903 (big discrepancy!), Lee Bradley was one of 17 children his parents had. He was possibly born in Scott, Mississippi, but possibly born in Lake Dick, Arkansas. Now, Broonzy always claimed he was born in 1893 and that’s reflected on the grave stone. But researchers into the lives of these blues legends have uncovered family records suggesting 1903. I’m not going to try and litigate this, except to note that the difference of 10 years seems likely to be told on someone’s face.

In any case, Bradley grew up in Lake Dick, which is outside of Pine Bluff, and started playing fiddle at a young age. His childhood remains wrapped in mystery and so is his young adulthood. He claimed he fought in World War I, but the historians have noted that there is no draft record or other evidence and if he was born on the latter date, he’d only have been 14 when the war started anyway.

What we do know for sure is that in the early 20s, Bradley followed the Great Migration out of the South to Chicago, where started working whatever job he could get. He also began to play guitar, getting that rural fiddle out of his blood and playing something more modern for the audiences moving north with him. His mentor was the medicine show performer Papa Charlie Jackson, who recorded some early sides for Paramount. That got the man increasingly known as Big Bill Broonzy a chance to record too. His first sides, under the name Big Bill and the Thomps (not a bad band name!) were released in 1927. They didn’t do much, but still, it was a start.

It took about five more years for Broonzy to become a meaningful recording artist. His style had a lot of work to do, but slowly, he rose in the Chicago Black music community. All the while of course, he was working pretty menial jobs to survive. He recorded for a variety of labels through the 30s. He opened for Memphis Minnie on at least one tour. He really started improving his recordings when he worked under Bluebird Records, owned by RCA Victor. In 1938, Robert Johnson was supposed to play a show at Carnegie Hall. This was a John Hammond production called From Spirituals to Swing. This included of contemporary legends of Black music. Other performers included Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, and the Golden Gate Quartet. There were even a couple of white bands, including Benny Goodman. Johnson was supposed to represent the guitar-based blues. But since he died, Hammond reached out to Broonzy to fill that role. That was a big deal for him. By this time, he was also writing a lot of songs for others and playing guitar on a lot of albums.

So by the 1940s, Broonzy was in peak form. That was a bridge period in the blues, when a lot of the early guys from the South had faded into obscurity and before the folk revival of the late 50s that found some of them–such as John Hurt and Skip James–and returned them to the light. But since Broonzy was a veteran Chicago performer, he was very much in the scene. In 1940, he helped develop “Key to the Highway,” which later became his signature tune. Like many of his songs, he did not record it first. It went to Charlie Segar, who recorded it for Vocalion. Now, like a lot of these songs, the actual writing credit is a bit unknown. Broonzy later told it as starting with some of Segar’s memories of a song from the South and then he worked it up into a modern tune. Broonzy then recorded it the next year as an 8-bar blues and that became the standard for the tune going forward. Certainly in the future, when it became one of the most beloved blues songs among white rockers of the 60s, it was the Broonzy version they fell in love with and that matters more than songwriting credit in this case.

By the end of World War II, two things were true–Broonzy was one of the nation’s key blues figures and his health was already starting to fail him. He smoked like a chimney and I am sure he drank more than his fair share too. That would cut his career short. In 1949, he worked with Studs Terkel on a traveling revue called I Come For To Sing. Terkel was the MC. Broonzy and others, including Win Stracke and Lawrence Lane, were the performers. They toured around the Midwest, an early version of the folk revival just beginning on college campuses. In fact, in the aftermath, with doctors already telling Broonzy to cut the touring, he moved to Ames, Iowa. Iowa State gave him a job as a janitor and he could perform locally to largely white audiences (not that I need to spell that out when talking about Ames) who wanted to hear him.

But he still toured. He went to Europe in 1951 and found audiences super receptive. This grew his reputation and on his return, he met Pete Seeger and other key figures of the folk revival. He played on tours with the commercially successful act of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He spent a lot of time in England in the early 50s, as audiences there seemed to like his work more than American whites did, which isn’t too surprising. He became a hero to people from Bert Jansch to Paul McCartney. In the mid 50s, Broonzy worked as a camp cook for some folk camp in rural Michigan, where he could also play. Seeger came and recorded a live Broonzy concert for radio there in 1954. Although as a modern man, he preferred to play electric guitar by this time, the whites who saw Black people as a way to give them their own identity, wanted to hear acoustic so he did what the audience wanted.

In 1955, Broozy wrote (or probably dictated) an autobiography called Big Bill Blues. He did a true world tour that year too, playing Africa and Asia. But the smoking had caught up with him. Lung cancer developed. He did a last set of recordings in Chicago in July 1957. Shortly after, he had a lung removed. A second operation that year destroyed his vocal cords and his career was done. Unfortunately. the cancer was not done. It returned in 1958 and killed him. He was either 55 or 65 years old.

Let’s listen to some Big Bill Broonzy.

Big Bill Broonzy is buried in Lincoln Cemetery, Blue Island, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other legends of the blues, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sonny Terry is in Birmingham, Alabama and Lightnin’ Hopkins is in Houston. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.