BIG BILL BROONZY - MISSISSIPPI RIVER BLUES

MISSISSIPPI RIVER BLUES

BIG BILL BROONZY

SONGWRITER: BIG BILL BROONZY

COUNTRY: U. S. A.

ALBUM: THE YOUNG BIG BILL BRONZY 1928-1935/VINYL

LABEL: YAZOO RECORDS

GENRE: BLUES

YEAR: 1991

Big Bill Broonzy(born Lee Conley Bradley, June 26, 1903– August 14, 1958) was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country blues to mostly African-American audiences. Through the 1930s and 1940s he successfully navigated a transition in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class African-American audiences. In the 1950s a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.

Broonzy copyrighted more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including both adaptations of traditional folk songs and original blues songs. As a blues composer, he was unique in writing songs that reflected his rural-to-urban experiences

Broonzy's influences included the folk music, spirituals, work songs, ragtime music, hokum, and country blues he heard growing up and the styles of his contemporaries, including Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Blake, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Broonzy combined all these influences into his own style of the blues, which foreshadowed the postwar Chicago blues, later refined and popularized by artists such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.

Although he had been a pioneer of the Chicago blues style and had employed electric instruments as early as 1942, white audiences in the 1950s wanted to hear him playing his earlier songs accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, which they considered to be more authentic.

He portrayed the discrimination against black Americans in his song "Black, Brown and White".The song has been used globally in education about racism, but in the late 1990s its inclusion in antiracism education at a school in Greater Manchester, England, led pupils to taunt the school's only black pupil with the song's chorus, "If you're white, that's all right, if you're brown, stick around, but if you're black, oh brother get back, get back, get back". The national media reported that the problem became so bad that the nine-year-old boy was withdrawn from the school by his mother. The song had already been adopted by the National Front, a far-right British political party which peaked in popularity in the 1970s and opposed nonwhite immigration to Britain.

A considerable part of Broonzy's early ARC/CBS recordings has been reissued in anthologies by CBS-Sony, and other earlier recordings have been collected on blues reissue labels, as have his European and Chicago recordings of the 1950s. The Smithsonian's Folkways Records has also released several albums featuring Broonzy.

(...)In the September 2007 issue of Q Magazine, Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, cited Broonzy's track "Guitar Shuffle" as his favorite guitar music. Wood remarked, "It was one of the first tracks I learnt to play, but even to this day I can't play it exactly right."

Eric Clapton has cited Broonzy as a major inspiration, commenting that Broonzy "became like a role model for me, in terms of how to play the acoustic guitar." Clapton featured Broonzy's song "Hey Hey" on his album Unplugged. The Derek and the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs includes their recording of "Key to the Highway".

(…)As part of the PopUp Archive project, in collaboration with the WFMT network, the Chicago History Museum, and the Library of Congress, an hour-long interview of Broonzy, recorded on September 13, 1955, by Studs Terkel was made available on-line. The interview includes reflections on his life and on the blues tradition, a performance of one of his most famous songs, "Alberta," and performances of "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad" and other classics.

Mississ-ippi river

Is so long, deep and wide

I can see my good girl

Standin' on that other side

I cried and I called

I could not make my baby hear

Lord, I'm 'on get me a boat, woman

Paddle on away from here

(guitar)

Ain't it hard to love someone

When they are so far from you

Lord, I'm on' get me a boat and

Paddle this old river blue

I went down to the landing

To see if any boats were there

And the fareman told me

Could not find the boats nowhere

(guitar)

The big boat ease up the river

Are turnin' 'round an 'round

Lord, I'm 'on get me a good girl

Or jump overboard an drown.