Big Bill Broonzy: Sings Folk Songs

BIG BILL BROONZY: SINGS FOLK SONGS (1956)

1) Backwater Blues; 2) This Train; 3) I Don't Want No Woman; 4) Martha; 5) Tell Me Who; 6) Bill Bailey; 7) Big Bill Blues; 8) Goin' Down This Road; 9) Tell Me What Kind Of Man Jesus Is; 10) Alberta; 11) Glory Of Love; 12) Careless Love.

In 1951, the best thing possible happened to Big Bill: as part of a folk music revue, he got signed on a tour to Europe — and thus, almost unintentionally, became the Old World's chief gateway into the world of American blues and folk right until his death in 1958, upon which the crown passed to Muddy Waters. Not the best blues singer, far from the best blues player, not much of a unique innovator, yet with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to impress and inspire thousands of col­lege kids across the Atlantic.

For a period of about five or six years, Big Bill toured back and forth quite extensively, leaving behind lots of recordings, mostly live, that would be useless to review separately, since he never troubled himself to vary his sets all that much. Sings Folk Songs, recorded for Moses Asch' Folk­ways (later Smithsonian) Records in 1956, is a very typical representative. (It is also the cleanest sounding Broonzy album you'll ever hear). The set mostly consists of various Appalachian-style stuff, mixed with gospel dance music, ballads, and just one or two straightahead blues numbers, and, as nice as it sounds, its chief value is historical — the best way to get your kicks out of it is imagine yourself as a young British student in the early Fifties, sitting in a small audience listen­ing to this strange black dude singing music from the «deep heart» of a strange new world.

Every reviewer and biographer will always point out the obvious fact that Big Bill only played acoustic guitar on those tours, even though his studio recordings from the past decade did not shy away from amplified instrumentation. (All the more reason for European audiences to be stunned when Muddy abruptly took over with the Chicago style). Nor does he ever try to launch into boo­gie or «hokum blues»; it is well possible that he understood what the audience really wanted — an aura of «rustic holiness» around that music — and that's exactly what he gave, even if his im­passioned renditions of folk-spirituals, to him, were just another style of popular entertainment that he fed the «intelligent» public. To each his own.

For some reason, my version of the album omits 'John Henry' (always the high point of the show, allowing him to really stretch out on one of the few «gimmicky» styles of acoustic playing that was available to him), but most regular versions have it, so if you feel like holding this historical document close to your heart, make sure that 'John Henry' is part of the proceedings. I'd also say that he plays one of the tightest and most expressive versions of 'Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad' I've ever heard — beats Woody Guthrie and the Grateful Dead all to hell. Overall, though, I do not feel empowered enough to rave on about how effectively this music transmits all the pain, suffering, hopes, and dreams accumulated in the souls of the Negro people over three hundred years of slavery, but I'll admit that good old Bill sure knew how to make a name — and some de­cent wages — for himself on the base of that legacy. And he certainly wasn't bad at what he was doing — just a bit overrated by way of lucky promotion breaks.

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Big Bill Broonzy: Vol. 3: 1940-1951

BIG BILL BROONZY: VOL. 3: THE WAR AND POSTWAR YEARS 1940-1951 (2007)

The last of the three big bulging boxsets is unquestionably the best in overall sound quality, for purely chronological reasons, but also questionably the best overall, or, at least, a great emotional improvement over the steady, unnerving sounds of Vol. 2. Two reasons are at play here.

First, some time around 1941, as if somehow fueled by the dark wartime premonitions, Big Bill became a classic hit songwriter. He certainly never overcame the formula, but somehow he mana­ged to give it a few unique twists that immortalized some of its representatives. That single year yielded such legendary stuff as 'All By Myself', an exceptionally lively, self-confident piece of boogie (with, finally, a well-expressed acoustic solo from the man himself) later appropriated by Fats Domino; 'I Feel So Good', an even more optimistic statement of utter satisfaction, whose macho potential would eventually be fully realized by Muddy Waters; and, of course, 'Key To The Highway', Bill's existentialist masterpiece No. 1, today far more tightly associated with De­rek & The Claptonos — but defenders of the faith would almost certainly claim that Bill is way more suited to feeling the lonesome-wanderer message of the song than some clean white middle class boy from Surrey.

These classics still have to be plucked out from a bed of same-sounding, not particularly invol­ving musical rocks. But then along comes war, and from 1942 to 1945 Big Bill, just like everybo­dy else, had serious trouble recording anything, what with the shellac deficit and all. Then, in the immediate post-war years, people needed to be happy, and much of his late 1940s material con­sists of rough, tough, foot-stomping boogie, occasionally spilling into «jump blues» as such ('Big Bill's Boogie', etc.) — unfortunately, this kind of music was much better done by burly shouters (Big Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris etc.) or much more seriously instrumentally endowed artists (Amos Milburn, Louis Jordan etc.).

However, it all ends January 4, 1949, on the date of Bill's recording session, credited to «Big Bill Broonzy & His Fat Four». That day, he was still doing the same small-combo boogie that made his fortunes so well-established, but his image so little-distinguishable (although a little bit of change was in the air, with his guitar parts clearly much more prominent than the backing band). Then, exactly one month later, the combo is dropped, and for the rest of his studio recording time in the States, Bill makes a decisive move back into the realm of acoustic-based music — with a heavy injection of traditional folk music into his blues structures, ranging from bluegrass motives to, you know, the Pete Seeger kind of stuff.

That stretch has sometimes been decried as risky (in fact, the liner notes themselves suggest that the move was «foolhardy»), but I cannot think of any other word than «refreshing» after nearly two decades of samey stuff that only yielded one truly impressive pre-war year of successful and influential songwriting. Not only does the man's moving away from boogie give him a chance to come up with some original, quirky chord changes ('Hey, Hey' so impressed Clapton that he would start off his Unplugged concert with the song fourty-five years later — played in the exact same manner as Bill does it, no better, no worse), he even allows himself to revisit that style of rapid-fire flat-picking that had once made 'How You Want It Done' so unforgettable, this time, on the old folk standard 'John Henry'.

In all, Vol. 3 runs an impressive gamut — all the way from Bill's songwriting maturation of 1941 to the transformation into the elder statesman of the grassroots commune by 1951, with the slow wisened-up sound of 'Trouble In Mind' wrapping things up. It could, and perhaps should, be said that Broonzy's place in the blues is somewhat overrated simply because he'd managed to swamp his much more talented competition with the sheer size of his output; altogether, these three sets amount to over three hundred sides, out of which I'd be hard-pressed to choose more than a dozen real favourites. (Then there's another, more serious, reason, which will be discussed in the next review). But you could also say the same about B. B. King — and, unlike the latter, Big Bill ne­ver recorded anything cringeworthy; never even «sold out» the way that, for instance, Lonnie Johnson did when he switched from technically amazing blues and jazz guitar pieces to smooth, lazy balladeering. There is never a point at which these unending samey-sounding blues and boo­gie pieces become «insufferable», and for a bundle of three hundred cuts, that's saying something.

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Big Bill Broonzy: Vol. 2: 1937-1940

BIG BILL BROONZY: VOL. 2: 1937-1940 (2005)

There is a damn good reason why JSP hesitated to go on slapping the name All The Classic Sides on Big Bill's second chronological boxset, covering the immediately pre-war years, going with the rather dry academic subtitle Annotated Discography instead — because none of these sides are, in any way, truly classic. Of the three huge sets, the middle one is easily the worst, and it looks like it ain't just my opinion: out of Vol. 2's grand total of 101 tracks, only one ('Just A Dream') made it onto the 26-track career retrospective These Blues Are Doggin' Me. One!

Why? Simple. By 1937, Bill had firmly sunk into a winning formula: playing smooth, steady, a little bit «mannered» mid-tempo blues and some modestly polite boogie-woogie, accompanied with small combos in which he was merely one of the guys. The formula worked, and the records sold, as steadily as they could during all the hard times. People liked the sound, and at one point, legendary promoter John Hammond even got the man to play Carnegie Hall as part of his From Spirituals To Swing shows that introduced America's white elites to black devil music.

But success and recognition somehow came at the expense of sacrificing identity. Listen hard and you will understand that Big Bill is still as accomplished a player as he used to be on these ses­sions — but listen really hard, or else the guitar will be completely lost behind the other instru­ments. He almost never solos, frequently sticks to the simplest boogie patterns, and even on those few tracks where his guitar is amplified, it is exceedingly hard to get impressed.

Some time during these years, Broonzy started trying to compensate by writing more original ma­terial; but «original material» at the time basically meant writing new lyrics to pre-existing melo­dies, and in 1940, the man hadn't yet found a proper way to insert little melodic twists that would prompt later generations to re-record and reinterpret his songs. On the contrary, the highlights of this volume are generally songs previously made into hits by other people — such as 'Louise Lou­ise Blues', a 1936 success for Johnny Temple (later expropriated by John Lee Hooker). But some of the lyrics are interesting, like the imaginary alpha-dog contest between Big Bill and his competitor Blind Boy Fuller on 'Jivin' Mr. Fuller Blues'.

Anyway, each one of these 101 tracks is pleasantly listenable, but overall, these are the sagging mid-period years in between Big Bill Broonzy the Dashing, Innovative Guitar Player and Big Bill Broonzy the Grand Maître of the Blues, preparing the grounds for Chicago's electric blues revolu­tion and at the same time immortalizing acoustic blues for European audiences. Refined lovers of the pre-war small blues combo sound will need this (especially since Bill's piano and trumpet-playing pals almost always have their own cool grooves going on), but I agree to stand by those compilers who normally skip this period in their retrospectives.

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Big Bill Broonzy: All The Classic Sides 1928-1937

BIG BILL BROONZY: ALL THE CLASSIC SIDES 1928-1937 (2004)

Writing on Big Bill from a record-based standpoint is pretty hard: out of all the pre-war / post-war country bluesmen, he was one of the most prolific, and, predictably, this translates into tons and tons and tons of nearly identical performances, differentiated only through their lyrical con­tent (and even then, that lyrical content rarely advances beyond a reshuffling of standard blues clichés, a process that could as well have been machine-generated).

Thus, attempting to review all of Big Bill's output through, say, the Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order series would be quite detrimental to one's health. We are therefore go­ing to speed up that process by relying, instead, on the JSP Records series, which have conveni­en­tly packaged everything that the man recorded in between 1928 and 1951 into three cozy box­sets, neatly equipped with minimal, but informative detail on the dates, locations, and participants of Broonzy's sessions.

Immediate warning: unless you are a true old-time blues aficionado, you really do not need any of these boxsets. The first one, in particular, includes a grand total of 129 tracks (and I am not even going to bother reproducing them all here) that, in between themselves, probably contain not more than 20 different melodies (and I am afraid I am being rather generous). Worse, JSP is one of those «honest» completist-targeted labels that only performs the most minimal remastering job on the tracks; and since during his earliest years Big Bill mostly recorded for Paramount, a label notorious for its piss-poor recording equipment (in a similar way and with far more criminal con­se­quences, they butchered most of Blind Lemon Jefferson's recordings), only about a third of these recordings is technically «enjoyable» — the rest crackles way too much even for my non-audiophile ears. For any purposes other than history immersion, you will do better with a compi­lation that concentrates on the highlights and cleans them up, e. g. Living Era's These Blues Are Doggin' Me (my first experience with Big Bill) or Yazoo's The Young Big Bill Broonzy.

What are these highlights, though? Tough to say. When William Lee Conley Broonzy first got around to recording, the two big markets for the blues — piano-based urban stuff and guitar-ba­sed country/Delta stuff — had already been well established, and it took him quite a while to make any impact on either; but when he finally did, he made an impact on both. In a cer­tain way, he synthesized them: even on this first boxset, there are as many connections to Leroy Carr in his performances as there are to Memphis Minnie.

Already his first recordings for Paramount in the late 1920s show an accomplished guitarist with an individual style. But Big Bill's force was not in the jaw-dropping technicality of the playing (typical of Lonnie Johnson and others), nor in the unpredictability of the chords he'd be producing (typical of Blind Lemon): from a layman's point of view, I would describe it as a meticulous ap­proach to the construction of his melodies. If his rags are derivative of Blind Blake's, they are «cleaner» and almost mathematically smoother — 'Guitar Rag' and 'Saturday Night Rub' are clas­sic tracks that drive the form to its utter perfection, and everything that comes afterwards is just a show-off (the way Steve Howe does it with 'The Clap'). And replicating his country-blues shuf­fles must be one hell of a satisfactory exercise for all scale-practicing guitarists out there — the sonic symmetry of tracks like 'I Can't Be Satisfied' is orgasmic.

There is also the matter of speed and precision: be sure that you get to hear the 1932 Vocalion release of 'How You Want It Done' and not the later re-recordings that simplify the guitar lines. On this particular performance, Big Bill simply machine-guns the song, an approach that I have not heard from any white blues-rocker with the possible exception of AC/DC's rhythm track to 'Baby Please Don't Go', and even there they never tried to work around that particular groove, based around a super-cool flat-picking technique. (Maybe to «refined» white bluesmen like Eric the technique seemed primitive, but one thing's for sure — it kicks far more ass than a whole ton of much more exquisite playing styles).

Most of Big Bill's best stuff from his first decade of recording is found on the first two out of five CDs — generally, Chicago-based recordings with a friend or two sitting in on second guitar and/or bass. As time went by, he became more comfortable with small combos that included a piano player or a little bit of brass backing, and, perversely, the more his recordings sold, the less genuinely interesting they became — much of this stuff is pure lounge entertainment, a bit of rag­time, a bit of swing, all delivered in Big Bill's nice, but utterly non-special, voice and with his guitar technique often sacrificed, melted away in the overall band sound. Depression-era audien­ces liked that — we don't have to, ever so spoiled by the strange idea that one has always got to emphasize one's strengths rather than humbly shoving them behind one's back. Fortunately, as later recordings would show, the mid-Thirties might have kept down Big Bill's real talents, but they certainly didn't extinguish them.