I Come for to Sing

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.

Epilogue

Born in 1956 just two years before Big Bill’s death, Michael van Isveldt, Big Bill’s only known son and heir, lives with his family in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Overtime, Michael has become steward of Broonzy’s legacy and memory. For decades, Michael resented his father for never teaching him about the nuances of racism as it related to global blackness, even in a place as seemingly progressive as Holland. In possession of an incredible archive of his mother’s personal effects, Michael has had to work with researchers and journalists interested in his father in a manner that has helped him overcome his frustration and disdain for a man he never knew.

Escaping the Folk

Since 1955, when a Belgian jazz writer helped scribe the first book investigating Big Bill’s life and music, dozens of artists, scholars, journalists, and enthusiasts have left a long trail of written work dedicated to Broonzy and his past. Well into the twenty-first century, this trend continues. These brokers of Broonzy’s life, music, and public memory have shaped and reshaped his story reflecting each respective generation’s own understandings of race, celebrity, blues music, and the black experience in the United States, among other themes. In a sense, Broonzy has become a cipher for unlocking important questions about authenticity, folklore, black identity, music history, and more to a large field of predominately white authors. For nearly sixty-five years, Big Bill and his history pop up along a long trajectory of studies that have viewed him as an object of intrigue and mystery rather than how he wanted to be remembered. Big Bill was an African American, pre-war, pop music celebrity who built and reached the height of that celebrity recording and performing for black audiences. Unearthing his vague, working class past has prevented history from accepting Big Bill for what he was—an agent of black modernity.

Southern Migrant Blues

As part of his New Negro transformation, Broonzy would give himself a new moniker, “Willie Broonzy,” and engage with black Chicago’s powerfully vibrant music scene. There, Broonzy would transform his musicianship from that of the country fiddler to a street singing, rent party, and burgeoning recording artist, fully engaged and carving out space in Bronzeville. Along the way, he would meet numerous musicians, talent scouts, and community stake holders whose expectations aided in Broonzy’s evolution as a southern migrant, New Negro, and aspiring musician. This chapter highlights Broonzy’s first forays into Chicago’s music industry and the vibrant but cutthroat environment shaping the early stages of his celebrity.

Introduction

The invention and reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy reveals numerous pathways African American entertainers faced during the first half of the twentieth century. After Broonzy left the South for Chicago, his 30-year career as a pioneer in blues music would be shaped by his own ambitions and those held by others. Both consciously and unconsciously, Big Bill became a full participant in Chicago and America’s critically vital New Negro Renaissance. Along the way, his reinventions would help negotiate African American celebrity and modernity in a manner that would hasten the transformation of his ever-expanding black consciousness.

We Love the Blues, but Tell Us about Jazz

Beginning in 1950, Broonzy would tour Europe and the United Kingdom for much of the 1950s while new generations in Britatin, Holland, France, Belgium, and more began discovering and rediscovering African American music from the pre-war period. Big Bill became one of the first African American blues artists to tour there, quickly becoming a fan favorite, especially in England. A subculture of continental Europeans from the period developed a lively community of jazz enthusiasts whose record collections and academic writings connected these post-war devotees across borders and languages. Central to their fascinations and curiosities was the juxtaposition between Bebop and traditional, New Orleans jazz. Many traditionalists loathed Bebop and through Big Bill, discovered the blues impact on but delineation from the music they loved so much. In the UK, the folk music revival spread, thanks in large part to Alan Lomax, and Lomax, by this point a good friend, found in Big Bill a treasure who could highlight his and the revival’s pretensions on black blues. In effect, Broonzy began navigating these audiences, essentially reinvigorating his career and building celebrity across the Atlantic.

Carving Out a Home in the Promised Land

Big Bill left the Deep South for Chicago in the early 1920s for Chicago, a rapidly industrializing city with an expanding black population in the city’s south side. There, he discovered Bronzeville, the African American section of Chicago. At the time, Bronzeville was fully engaged in the New Negro Renaissance of the age where black southern migrants like Big Bill challenged established class, political, cultural, and social norms in a contest centered on remaking American blackness over as modern. Black Chicago and its expanding consumer marketplace became one of the nation’s centers for transforming African American identity and culture of the age.

Big Bill Broonzy

While touring Europe through the 1950s, Big Bill became a legendary musician whose music and history mesmerized European audiences in the UK and on the continent. Although successful, his tours there added frustrations and created personal relationships that would stay with him until the end of his life. In Holland, he met a young Dutch theatre costume designer with whom he fell in love and produced a son. From the early 1950s to his death in 1958, Big Bill would try to maintain his relationship with Pim van Isveldt while balancing the significant changes in his career and a wife back home in Chicago. Broonzy crafted celebrity in Europe that moved beyond the United States’ racial boundaries, eventually becoming an iconic figure for black music during the decade even if he had been marginalized within the folk music revival and changing music landscape back home.

The Rise of Big Bill

Big Bill would survive the seeming collapse and subsequent reorganization of the recording industry virtually intact as an artist. Quickly, he became one of the country’s leading and most prolific blues artists and would aid in the development of pre-WWII Chicago blues. By establishing relationships with agents and promoters like Lester Melrose, Broonzy would transform from William Lee Connely Broonzy into “Big Bill,” one of the most celebrated African American musicians among black audiences from the pre-war years. By 1942, however, with help from the American Federation of Musician’s two-year recording ban, Broonzy’s impact as a black pop star began to wane. A second wave of black migrants to Chicago would carry new sounds and ideas as they made their homes and built communities in black Chicago. After the war, “Big Bill’s” celebrity had lost its lustre, forcing him to look for new spaces and faces to reinvent his career and identity.

Southern Blues

Born at the turn of the twentieth century in Jim Crow Arkansas, Lee Bradley experienced the hardships of growing up black in the Mississippi and Arkansas River deltas. Introduced to music at a young age, Bradley developed an unusual talent as a country fiddler. Over time, he gained enough renown that his musicianship offered opportunities for work outside of his poor, sharecropping community. Just as he began cultivating his own sense of local music celebrity, he was pulled into the United States Army as a member of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. His experiences abroad as a solider had an enormous impact on his understanding of the South, Jim Crow, and his own plight upon his return.