But getting back to your interpretation, the way you’ve always approached what could be regarded as classic blues.
The way that I’ve always looked upon any interpretation of a great blues musician’s material was to take the most obvious things and simplify them. Like my way of doing “Crossroads” was to take that one musical figure and make that the point, the focal point. Just trying to focus on what the essence of the song was—keeping it simple.
You mean you simplify to reach a broader audience?
No, no, just to make it … playable for me. I am very limited in my technique, really, so what matters in my playing is the simplicity of it and that it gets to the point. Rather than playing around everything.
But very few of the bluesmen are virtuosos.
No, nor am I. That’s how I identified with them. It’s not what is said but how it’s said. Not how much is said, but the way it’s said. And that’s what I would try to draw out of anything that was a great influence on me, try to draw out of Robert [Johnson] what was the spirit of what was being said as much as the way or the form or the technique.
Where would you draw that spirit from?
From what I heard.
When you started out, you tried to envision the car the person was driving, the smell of the car, the specific locale or milieu …
Yeah, the outward sensations that would echo what was going on inside.
Was it almost like method acting? Was it a specific discipline you put yourself through to try to get to the core of the thing?
Yeah, it would be. It would be a discipline you would introduce to make that possible. On the surface of things, the sound of the music kind of overwhelms you. And then all these pictures come into your head. Say if I’ve got a gig tonight with Buddy [Guy], I’ve really got to kind of call up all this stuff that goes right back to when I first heard Robert Johnson, or Little Walter “live.” They’re all in there. All this stuff is inside me. It’s just a matter of tapping it.
Do you tap into your own reserve of emotional experience, memories of your grandparents, your mother … ?
That’s all I’ve got to refer to… It isn’t labeled. It’s a bag of emotions that have been untapped by—
I mean, even when I was in psychotherapy for a while, I would reserve … Even in deep psychotherapy there was a certain place that no one … that I wouldn’t let him go. Because that is meant to be used for my music.
That’s what maintains its spontaneity? Otherwise it would become formulaic for you?
Yeah, I think so. It’s always fresh. And that kind of, like, leads me to a troubled life, in a way. My personal life really suffers from that. Suffers from a lot of … kind of inability to deal with relationships, things like that. Because, you know, I keep a lot of this stuff inside.
It disallows total unburdening?
Total intimacy with other people. Yeah.
Do you feel this is true for all artists?
I think so. To a greater or lesser degree. There’s a place that you won’t let anyone else go… I don’t think it’s a question of being frightened of losing their creativity or anything like that. It’s deeper than that.
You’ve often said that you felt the best of Buddy Guy has never gotten onto record, that the spirit of the music, the almost total freedom of his blues, isn’t really transferable to record. Do you feel that’s true of your own music as well?
To a certain extent, yes. I still think my best playing exists separately from the songs. It’s just something that is of its own. To get that onto a record is difficult, because you kind of become much more studied.
Have you thought about taking a mobile recording unit and attempting to capture moments like those?
No, because I kind of like it the way it is. You know, there’s something very true, in a way, that some music belongs to the concert hall and the audience and should remain that way. And for the gods.
BIG BILL BROONZY: KEY TO THE HIGHWAY BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY
I got the key to the highway, yes, and I’m billed
out and bound to go
I’m gonna leave, leave here runnin’, because
walkin’ is most too slow
—Big Bill Broonzy, “Key to the Highway”
Even when Big Bill was small, he was on the move.
His father, Frank, and mother, Nettie, were sharecroppers and former slaves. When Big Bill was born on a June day in Scott, Mississippi, in 1893, Frank, a Baptist and a deacon in the church, cursed for the first and only time in his life. He had left for several days to get food for the family and arrived home to find that his wife had given birth to twins, Bill and his sister, Lanie. Bill was one of sixteen children in the family, and that added up to more mouths than Frank had expected he’d have to feed.
The family, looking for a better sharecropping situation, relocated to Langdale, Arkansas, when Bill was eight years old. Then, when Bill was twelve, they moved to Scotts Crossing. By that time, Bill had taken up the fiddle—he fashioned his first one out of a cigar box. In his early years he was a devout Christian, but he eventually left the church to earn a living doing odd jobs and playing music. “Christian’s one thing, and money’s another,” he said. “I had to quit church because they wouldn’t pay me no money to preach.” He was caught up in the draft in 1917 and was sent off to Europe. It was a confusing period for the youngster, who went quickly and without training or schooling from plantation life to World War I’s international conflict. He did what he was told but didn’t really know what he was doing. “I don’t know the names of all the places where we went, but it was in France,” Bill said.
When Broonzy returned from the war back to Arkansas in 1919, a white man he had known before he left confronted him. “Those clothes you got there,” the man said. “You can take ‘em off and get you some overalls. Because there’s no nigger gonna walk around here with no Uncle Sam’s uniform on, see, up and down these streets.” Broonzy was a big guy—over six feet tall and solidly built. War had changed him, made him tougher, less willing to follow orders. The new Bill was not easily pushed around. Something in him had grown bolder; he now laughed in the face of conflict. He wanted to follow his own path and not the roads that others laid down for him. This particularly postwar confrontation, however, got to him, and he remembered it long afterwards. He grew to dislike the South and its oppressive ways. Even when he was home, Bill didn’t feel at home. From then on, he’d only feel at home on the road.
I’m goin’ down on the border … where I’m better known ‘Cause you haven’t done nothin’, woman, but
drive a good man away from home
In 1920, Big Bill Broonzy left Arkansas and went to Chicago. “The main reason I left home was
“Broonzy had a big body of work. Broonzy was big here—he got showed on TV, and it was so spellbinding. I think anyone who was leaning in that direction got it from there.” — Eric Clapton
Big Bill Broonzy died a few months after this photo was taken in 1958.
because I couldn’t stand eating out of the back trough all the time,” Broonzy said. “In the army, I had been used to being considered a man irregardless.” He wasn’t alone in his journey. Many thousands of blacks at that time were making the great migration, leaving the South and heading to what they hoped would be better prospects in the North. “Sweet Home Chicago,” as Robert Johnson once put it, was the new gathering place for a wave of itinerant blues and jazz musicians, including Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and Memphis Minnie. All hailed, originally, from places in the South. All came to the Windy City in search of better jobs, better venues in which to play music, and better recording opportunities. Broonzy was in the center of the blues world.
After moving to Chicago, Broonzy worked as a molder in a foundry, and also as a cook, a grocery packer, a piano mover, and a Pullman porter. He took the work as it came. “None of us would ever make enough money just playing music,” Broonzy said. Along the way, he kept
playing his music, in taverns and nightclubs, at parties and on street corners, and eventually he recorded some of his songs. Soon enough, Broonzy was considered by many to be the most popular blues star around. He made his first record under his own name in Chicago in 1927; it was a recording of “House Rent Stomp” for Paramount Records. He went on to lay down tracks for a number of different companies over the course of his career, including such labels as Bluebird, Columbia, OKeh, Champion, Melotone, and Oriole. In 1938, Broonzy (filling in for the late Robert Johnson) was a performer at the “Spirituals to Swing Concert” at Carnegie Hall.
Through all of the acclaim, Broonzy kept his day jobs. He once calculated that, out of 260 of his compositions, he made perhaps two thousand dollars. He also said he never saw even a penny of royalty money until 1939, well into his recording career. “I made more playing in taverns and nightclubs than I ever did out of records,” he said. “A lousy guy that lets you work your head off and then gets on easy street and leaves you still where you were? I don’t understand people like that. It’s just outrageous to me.”
Broonzy was known, but he wasn’t really famous, and he sure wasn’t rich. Other performers rerecorded his songs without giving him any credit or money. His records sold, but the traditional blues audience was still a niche market. White performers singing blues-based music seemed to be the ones making the real profits. Broonzy once said of Elvis Presley, “He’s singing the same thing I’m singing now. And he knows it. ‘Cause really, the melody and the tune and the way we used to call it ‘rocking the blues’ years ago when I was a kid … that’s what he’s doing now… Rock & roll is a steal from the old, original blues.”
So Broonzy kept on the road and kept playing concerts, trying to steal back a little of his own thunder. Life on the road could be chaotic, filled with the temptations of women and alcohol, and sometimes Broonzy happily gave in to both. Big Bill liked to tell the story of a gig he once landed in New York City. He had been in the habit of taking two or three drinks before he performed; he felt it dulled his fear and helped him remember his songs. But for his new singing job, his bosses told him he couldn’t drink. One night, Broonzy, after spending the evening carousing with friends, showed up at his new gig loaded. “I’m drunk,” he admitted to his new boss. “Please forgive me. It”ll never happen again.” Broonzy went on to play two shows that night. Afterward, his boss gave him his pay, which included five more dollars than usual. “Take this,” said the boss, “and be drunk tomorrow night. You played better tonight than ever.”
Still, Broonzy came to long for some stability. He had been running all his life, from Arkansas and back, to war and back, from the South to the Midwest to the North. Near the end of his career, Broonzy played a summer gig at Iowa State College at Ames. When the college offered him a job as a janitor there, he took the offer and stayed. He considered the position a dream job. Big Bill Broonzy, master of the blues, now spent more time with a mop than with a guitar.
Now when the moon creeps over the mountain,
I’ll be on my way
Now I’m gonna walk this old highway, until the
break of day
In the 1950s, Studs Terkel asked the British actor John Neville if he had ever heard Big Bill Broonzy.
Neville famously replied, “Everybody in England knows Big Bill. Who doesn’t?”
Terkel, a native of Chicago who was, frankly, shocked that a bluesman who was little-known in his home country and even his hometown could be so famous abroad, replied, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred of his countrymen have never heard of him.”
Now it was Neville’s turn to be stunned. Why wouldn’t such a talent, so beloved by Europeans, be embraced by his fellow Americans?
Broonzy’s conquest of Europe began with his first tour there. Friends in Chicago and admirers abroad helped set up a European sojourn for Broonzy in 1951, as well as a subsequent visit. Broonzy wasn’t worried whether his very American music would translate. “A cry’s a cry in any language,” he said. “A shouts a shout, too, in any language.” Indeed, his concerts in Europe were a smash and he achieved a fame there that he never enjoyed in the States. Years later, Max Jones wrote in Melody Maker about Broonzy’s first concert in London, held at Kingsway Hall in 1951: “He found there an audience receptive to the best songs in his extensive repertoire and to his finest feats of guitarmanship, an audience that regarded him as a combination of creative artist and living legend.” Broonzy created a new musical iconography for a generation of young British musicians. His songs were rich and varied, from hollers of pain to sly social commentaries. He had, over the course of his career, experimented with the electric guitar and played with a drummer; he had performed with a variety of backing bands. But late in his career, he presented himself as the last of a dying line, a true bluesman from the South, standing alone, summoning old ghosts, single-handedly representing an old, grand culture. British kids, desperate for some culture to grab hold of in the shattered post-World War II world, saw in his music a kind of escape. Not an escape to some carefree place but an escape to a place where things mattered, where instrumental prowess was prized, where social protest was savored, where blue pain could be transmuted into musical joy.
The blues, in America, are black-and-white. It’s difficult to listen to the blues, in an American context, without also hearing the echo of slavery, of segregation, of field hands communicating to each other in the secret rhythms of their own music. That’s why when white men first took up the blues it was seen as some sort of cultural breakthrough, as if some invisible line had been crossed. Many Europeans had no such guilt; they recognized no such lines. They could listen to the blues without hearing some conflict of cultures and colors. For them, there was no discord in the music, there were no cultural barriers, there was only art. The Europeans who adopted the blues was, arguably, better able than some of their American counterparts to see the artistic possibilities in the form and to speak in their own tongues rather than in voices that seemed crude parodies of the music’s originators. Blues, as a music, traveled. The cultural baggage stayed home.
Broonzy’s journeys had an effect on him, too, especially a trip that he took to Senegal. “I look at those people an’ I felt I must’ve been here before, my people, I mean,” Broonzy said. “All my family is tall. And I looked at all these seven-footers, I felt like a midget. I run into a family named Broonzie. They spelt it IE instead of Y, but it was the same name. Yeah, I think my ancestors came from there.”
In the last year of his life, Broonzy suffered from lung and throat cancer. Many of his contemporaries were dead or long forgotten. Rock & roll was all the rage, and the blues was out of fashion. Broonzy’s own voice was being eaten away by his ailments. He began to think about his legacy. Broonzy said, “I don’t want the old blues to die because if they do I’ll be dead, too, because that’s the only kind I can play and sing and I love the old style. I have traveled all over the U.S.A., in every state and also in Mexico, Spain, Germany, England, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Africa, Belgium, France, trying to keep the old-time blues alive, and I’m going to keep on as long as Big Bill is still living.”
Broonzy died of cancer on August 15, 1958. Services were held at Chicago’s Metropolitan Funeral Parlor. A tape was played of Big Bill singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Messages of condolence came in from London, Paris, Rome, and Brussels. In the years and decades afterward, British performers whom Broonzy influenced, such as the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, brought his music back to America, inspiring new generations of blues fans. The blues would never be as hot as they had been once upon a time in the South, but the art form was still on the move, just like Bill was when he was alive, traveling from city to city, from continent to continent, from decade to decade. Big Bill was dead, but the blues sure weren’t.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING:
Big Bill Broonzy, Trouble in Mind (Smithsonian/Folkways,
2000). A fair sampling of his work.
Big Bill Br
oonzy, The Young Big Bill Broonzy 1928-1935
(Yazoo, 1991). A look at the early years.
Keith Richards, Talk Is Cheap (Virgin, 1998). His best
solo album.
Derek and the Dominos, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (RSO, 1970) Eric Clapton and sidemen, including Duane Allman, cover “Key to the Highway.”
THE FIRST TIME I MET THE BLUES
By Vol Wilmer
[Excerpt from a longer reminiscence, first published in Mojo, 1995]
The first time I met the blues he was wearing a large charcoal overcoat, pegged navy pants and a hand-painted tie. A soft brown trilby was pushed to the back of his head, the tartan muffler around his neck unknotted despite the chill of the February night and the wind that came whistling off the Thames. Dwarfing an entourage of critics, collectors, and other musicians, guitarist Big Bill Broonzy was a powerful presence as he emerged from the backstage depths of the Royal Festival Hall, accompanied by fellow Mississippian Brother John Sellers and smelling of whiskey. To a fifteen-year-old who barely knew where the South Bank was—let alone Chicago’s South Side—he was a conquering hero, the legend made flesh. In 1957, he certainly had the edge on Lonnie Donegan and “Rock Island Line.”
My memory of him is of a big man who seemed pleasantly full of himself and laughing, but he allowed himself to be waylaid for a moment by the teenager who waved an autograph book under his nose. With a quip to his companions, he leant on his guitar case as he struggled to see in the half dark and write his name. Clearly penmanship wasn’t his forte, but the bold scrawl he made in my book and “Best wishes to Valerie” across his photo in the program were sufficient reward for the long wait outside the stage door and the knowledge that I had to get up early for school in the morning. They remain a cherished reminder for me of one of the most exciting nights of my life…
The excitement that greeted the arrival of Big Bill and Muddy, and the fascination with the fabric of their lives, is impossible for the present generation of blues fanciers to imagine—just as the idea that this music would enjoy a second revival would have been inconceivable to those of us who were there the first time around. The adulation was intense, the kind pop idols got—although most of the purists would not have admitted that.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 36