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June
28, 2003
A Conversation with
the Blues
The Music of
Big Bill Broonzy
By
RON JACOBS
Back in the early 1970s I worked at an International
House of Pancakes in a suburban Maryland town. The pay was lousy,
the work was hot and rapid-fire, and my fellow workers were all
pretty cool. There was one in particular who sticks out in my
mind. He was the manager (not that that means anything in the
food service business except that one works more hours for not
much more pay than the folks (s)he supervises)-a forty year old
Black man from Kansas City who had done a little time in prison
and a lot of time in the streets. His wit was remarkably cutting
at times. Other times it was full of warmth and humanity. The
thing I liked best were his stories and his singing. The man
was a treasury of tunes, especially old blues and r and b.
We both worked a shift every Friday and
Saturday night that kept us in the kitchen from 6 in the evening
until 6 the following morning. Fortunately, I had a friend who
was a pharmacist's assistant. She managed to save a couple pills
out of every shipment of speed and was more than happy to share
them with my co-worker and me. It was after these pills kicked
in on these evenings when the songs began to roll. They might
include the Coasters "Charlie Brown" to "They
all ask for me, The cows ask, the pigs ask, they all ask for
me." I was working with a human jukebox. My favorite of
his songs was a blues that the late Big Bill Broonzy wrote called
"Black, Brown and White." When my boss got to singing
this song, he had every cracker in the restaurant looking towards
the kitchen. It always seemed to me that they were afraid that
their just desserts were coming out the kitchen door any minute.
It was all just a little speed-fueled fun, but the white folks
didn't know that.
Big Bill Broonzy was born in Mississippi
in late June of 1893. Soon afterwards his family moved to Arkansas.
He lived the life of a poor black in America's south. One of
seventeen children, he began work in the fields early and was
sharecropping by 1915. However, when the drought ruined the
harvest a year later, he went off to work in the mines and in
1917 he was called into the Army. When he came back home he
was restless and bored. He got a job on the trains and headed
to Chicago where he picked up guitar playing. By the 1930s he
was making records on small "race record" recording
labels. Like so many other folk-blues musicians of his time,
it was John Hammond who brought Broonzy to a larger audience.
This occurred when he performed at a Carnegie Hall concert in
1939 titled "Spirituals to Swing." Even with the greater
commercial success Big Bill experienced in the wake of his wider
audience, he was never wealthy. Like so many other African-Americans
of his time, most of the money never reached his pockets.
Although Broonzy and others in his genre
were often called to play spirituals, he considered himself a
blues musician through and through. When asked why, he would
tell a story about a turtle he caught to eat. After his uncle
chopped off the turtle's head, the turtle walked headless back
to the stream where Bill had caught it. As Bill told the story,
his uncle told him "There's a turtle who's dead and don't
know it." Big Bill would continue: "And that's the
way a lot of people is today: they got the blues and they don't
know it." According to his autobiography, Big Bill Blues,
he first played a fiddle he made out of a cigar box when he was
ten. It was after he moved to Chicago and worked as a Pullman
porter that he learned guitar.
Much of Big Bill's repertoire is the
standard stuff that blues are made of. You know--women doing
him wrong or spending all his money and women spending all his
money and then doing him wrong. Other songs in his pocket are
full of sexual innuendo and bravado. Still others are a variation
of the blues lament. My favorite from this group has a verse
that goes like this: "The men in the mine baby/They all
lookin' down at me/Gal I'm down so low baby/I'm low as I can
be/Yeah now baby/Girl I'm down as I can be/Gal I'm down so low
baby/Ooh Lord everybody's lookin' down on poor me." All
of this, of course, sung to the melodic guitar play backed up
with a percussive thumb stroke on those lower strings.
Broonzy's songs weren't all women, whiskey
and personally caused hard luck, though. Some of his best songs
dealt with tragedy and injustice. These excerpts from his 1937
"Southern Flood Blues" evoke a fear and sense of loss
that every person who's been the victim of natural disaster can
feel to their bones:
I was hollerin' for mercy,
and it weren't no boats around
Hey I was hollerin' for mercy, and it weren't no boats around
Hey that looks like people, I've gotta stay right here and drown
Hey my house started shakin',
started floatin' on down the stream
Hey my house started shakin', went on floatin' on down the stream
It was dark as midnight, people began to holler and scream
Listen to this piece and you're on the
roof of your house going down a river whose rage is relentless-a
rage with little hope of being soothed. This same sense of rage
seethes just underneath the surface of my two favorite Broonzy
songs, barely keeping the volcanic ash of his anger from raining
down on the listener: "I Wonder When I'll Get To Be Called
A Man," and "Black, Brown And White." These are
songs about the most despairing blues of all. Those are the
blues that don't have to be. Blues that exist not because of
a misunderstanding in love or a poor crop or even a terrible
flood, but because of ignorance and fear and the hatred that
combination spawns.
The first song asks the question at the
end of every verse: "I wonder when I'll get to be a man?"
Big Bill asks the listener (and the system that keeps his people
down) what does it take? He's been in the man's military and
fought for them overseas, he's worked on the levee and chopped
down their trees. He's played all their games and he's gone
to school. "When," he wonders. "when will I get
to be called a man/Do I have to wait till I get ninety-three?"
The second song, "Black, Brown and White," was the
song my co-worker used to sing. Like "I Wonder When I'll
Get to Be Called a Man," the song is a litany of injustices
done to African-Americans in the US solely because they aren't
white. From the verse about a bar where he was refused service
to the verse about his trouble finding a job, this song leaves
no doubt about how the system sees him. The title's reference
to brown is a not-so-subtle dig at the gradations of prejudice
based on how dark one actually is. In other words, the darker
one's skin is, the less chances this country provides. I think
Big Bill sums it up in the final verse and chorus:
I hope when sweet victory
With my plough and hoe
Now I want you to tell me brother
What you gonna do about the old Jim Crow?
Now if you was white, should
be all right
If you was brown, could stick around
But if you black, whoa brother, git back git back git back.
These aren't sentiments of submission.
They are insightful and acerbic criticisms of the society in
which Big Bill lived. It is a society in which these criticisms
are truer than they should be at this juncture in our history.
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
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William
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Standard
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The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
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Harry
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Harold
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David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
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The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
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Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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