“Just a Dream”

Lee Conley Bradley

Big Bill Broonzy was born Lee Conley Bradley on June 26 somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century in Jefferson County Arkansas, the fourth boy of ten children. ¹⁸ He grew up within a large, poor, and relatively stable sharecropping family with roots in slavery and the era of Reconstruction. His first introductions to music came on Sundays in church and from the work songs of the cotton fields and work camps of his childhood where he formed his first musical style as a country fiddler, playing for white weekend parties in rural Arkansas. As a working musician, Broonzy was able to circumvent the physical and economic hardships that challenged the daily lives of his sharecropping parents, which ultimately left him with a sense of earning a “pretty good” living. ¹⁹ Broonzy once informed Alan Lomax in an interview that he was one of the best musicians in his rural community and helped support his nuclear family’s aspirations. Yet Broonzy’s musical persona came with personal sacrifices. His musical abilities, shared only with white audiences, left him separated from other rich African American musical traditions flowering in the Deep South during the period and constantly aware of the Deep South’s caste system. ²⁰ Quickly he learned that music could become racialized in the South, ensuring that his race consciousness developed rather quickly. Like many young rural southern musicians, Broonzy made his first instruments, first a cornstalk fiddle, then a handmade “fiddle fashioned from a cigar box. ²¹ By age nineteen Broonzy had learned to play a “real” fiddle and earned tips playing for various white functions including picnics, country-dances, and even church congregations “through Arkansas, and Mississippi, and some parts of Texas.” ²² Often making good money—fifty dollars for a three-day picnic, plus tips—Broonzy performed waltzes, reels, two-steps, and ragtime that often included numbers like “Missouri Waltz,” “Sally Gooden,” “On the Road to Texas,” “Over the Waves,” and “Uncle Bud.” ²³

By his early twenties, Broonzy, who was raised a strict Baptist, served as a country preacher for several Arkansas country churches and married “the first woman he ever knew.” ²⁴ He stopped playing the fiddle altogether and renounced his “devilish ways.” That changed, however, when several white plantation owners—who had heard of his talents—approached him to perform at a series of white dances. This opportunity allowed him to make far more money than he could have sharecropping. So as Broonzy put it, “Christian’s one thing but money’s another.” ²⁵

In 1917, Broonzy was drafted in the United States Army and sent to Camp Pike, Arkansas, where he received basic training and sent to Newport News, Virginia, to be shipped off to Brest, France, as a member of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War I. Broonzy once expressed that he had previously relinquished control of his adult life to the white overseer that controlled his tenant farm, to his wife at the time, who demanded that he improve their lot in life, and most of all, to the U.S. Army. As a soldier in a stevedore battalion stationed in Brest, France, during World War I, Big Bill transformed himself into something vastly different than the Arkansas sharecropper, country fiddler, and preacher he had been before the war, resulting in a new man who “didn’t want nobody tellin’ him how to live his life.” ²⁶ Like many of his fellow black soldiers, Broonzy had witnessed both the horrors of war and the open racism that had followed the AEF from the United States to Europe, and he was forever changed by these experiences. ²⁷ Broonzy admitted:

Well my wife always, before I went into the Army, whatsoever she said went. An when-after I went into the Army and came out, well, then she wanted to do the same thing, you know. . . . Well I wouldn’t stand for that, see? And the same things about a white man down there I had to work for. They’d try to tell me this and tell me that, and I didn’t care no more about a white man than I did about a black man, see? And whensoever he tried to tell me something that I had to do, why, that’s why we fell out. . . . So, I just left from there and went to St. Louis and stayed for a while and left from there came to Chicago. ²⁸

The process Broonzy described in this passage reveals both his growing race consciousness and his black manhood. Broonzy knew quite well that black men in the South “never get to be men . . . it’s always boy until you get too old, then they called you uncle.” ²⁹ Immediately he left for Chicago armed with an expanding race consciousness and new identity in search of a land of promise.

As Broonzy made Chicago his home in the early 1920s, then, his race pride and sense of masculinity developed during an important time for black Chicago and community respectability. “Old Settlers” and “New Settlers” ideas about the city’s expanding black landscape began to merge, as labels such as old and new “became much less about when one arrived in Chicago” and much more about “one’s relationship to ideas about industrialized labor and leisure as expressions of respectability.” ³⁰ In other words, the emerging black middle class began adopting Old Settler notions of respectability and refinement centered on committed and consistent employment along with a superficial appearance that reflected “economic thrift, bodily restraint, and functional modesty in personal and community presentation.” ³¹ By conforming to Old Settler respectabilities, this new class could advance the race by presenting and adhering to public principles that focused on labor pursuits and modes of behavior that defied white notions of black inferiority. ³²

Broonzy’s labor pursuits in this new environment thrust him to the forefront of this negotiation. After brief stints in Chicago’s foundry industries, Broonzy landed a job at the Pullman Company, where he worked for two years. For nearly all upper-class black Chicagoans, the Pullman Company was an ideal vocational path to community respectability. To Old Settlers, the reputation accompanying the status of Pullman Porters was widely regarded throughout Chicago with the utmost respect and was believed to be an avenue for financial stability and middle-class sensibilities. ³³ Even to New Settlers like media mogul Robert Abott, whose Chicago Defender continually antagonized Chicago’s racial status quo by reporting on black railroad workers to help drive home support for Pullman Porters’ struggles for pay increases, the status of Pullman porter automatically placed African American redcaps at a higher level of community respectability. In fact, the Defender routinely reported the names of Pullman employees who had achieved the level of porter and considered the occupation one of the most important in the community. ³⁴

For the Pullman Company, Broonzy started as a laborer “cleanin cars an’ cleanin up the yards,” eventually working his way to the respected position of porter. ³⁵ At this point, Broonzy had worked his entire life and it is hardly surprising, then, that his first manner of business upon arriving in Chicago was to find secure employment. At seven he was first hired out to a family in Arkansas where he assisted in the care of the family’s children. For the next nineteen years Broonzy worked as a plow-hand, a country musician, a preacher, a levee camp worker, a railroad laborer, a cook, and member of the U.S. armed services. ³⁶ Even as Broonzy’s music career began to grow in the thirties and forties, he maintained a “day job.” From 1925 to 1927 he worked as a grocery boy for $12 dollars a week; from 1927 to 1934 as a laborer for the Richigan Co. in Melrose Park for $35 dollars a week; for the WPA from 1934 to 1936; and for the Merchandise Mart from 1938 to 1943. ³⁷ Throughout the twenties and thirties, then, he remained consistently employed. “I always had money; I never was just plumb flat broke, because before I’d get broke, I’d get a job someplace and work.” ³⁸ Further, it seems that with each change of his places of employment, he increased his weekly wages. In many ways, then, Broonzy’s pursuit of financial stability echoes Old Settler’s ideas on the importance of persistent employment. At the same time, however, Broonzy was drawn to new cultural developments in the Black Metropolis that contradicted black leaders’ notions of respectability.

A New Leisure Culture

Of greatest concern to black Chicago’s “Old Settler” middle-class sensibilities was migrants’ perceived propensity towards the city’s vibrant underworld and nightlife. These “vice dens” of gambling, prostitution, drinking, illicit drugs, and sinful music stood at the centerpiece of black middle-class community criticism. To be clear, the black aesthetic has never been uniform in any African American community. Some black leaders, therefore, did not believe this culture perpetuated white fears and stereotypes concerning the black community nor bolster white hostility toward southern migrants. ³⁹ Nevertheless, to many reform-minded African Americans, a new generation of young black men and women were spending too much time in the city’s cabarets, sporting dens, rent party circuits, dance halls, vaudeville houses, and movie theaters. Moreover, their behavior stood in direct opposition to the black bourgeoisie’s Victorian ideas about a solid and viable working class. ⁴⁰ If blacks were to gain any amount of respectability in the eyes of whites, then, Old Settlers believed migrants had to avoid outward and open displays of behavior that reinforced white notions of inferiority. And this world of vice, while driving some voices among African American leaders in Chicago to reform its working class, was, at the same time, establishing a “commercialized leisure world” that relied on “alternative forms of labor, routes toward upward mobility, and visions of the racial community.” ⁴¹

These points of criticism, then, signified, as one scholar has argued, the emergence of a “‘New Settler’ ideology” that turned to the city’s booming “commercialized leisure world” to combat Chicago’s power dynamics and white racism, Old Settler middle-class reform, and the stigmas forced on a new migrant working class. ⁴² This world of leisure remapped ideas about New Settler respectability. It provided work within the black community in which blacks could advance economically, while simultaneously displaying pride in their community, the black aesthetic, and entrepreneurship. Black men and women, to be sure, traded in the dirty coveralls and dusty work dresses they wore in the long hours in Chicago’s labor and domestic industries for “the latest risqué fashions” as they frequented Chicago’s dens of vice and boisterous nightclubs. At the center of this new dynamic was the developing consumer marketplace with its “moving pictures, radio and records, advertising, and athletics” that openly set off new negotiations of migrant respectability. ⁴³

The development of a commercialized leisure world in the city and its distinct music culture were extremely important for migrants like Broonzy. An identity closely associated with labor defined southern African Americans during slavery and these ideas carried over into the post–Civil War, Reconstruction-era South. As African Americans left the southern countryside for southern cities or left the South completely during the Great Migrations, their relationships to labor changed dramatically. ⁴⁴ Upon relocation to industrialized centers of the North, South, Midwest, and West, they entered in an urban and industrialized world that fueled an era of unparalleled economic growth in the United States, ultimately becoming key components of an identifiable American working class.

Broonzy arrived at an incredibly important time for blues music in Chicago as new trends in blues recording were emerging. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the popular emergence of the lone, self-accompanied male performer popularized by entertainers like Sylvester Weaver, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lonnie Johnson transformed the blues as a form of recorded music. These vaudeville veterans and their jazz-tinged, female counterparts set the early standard for blues recording and performance that would revolutionize blues songwriting, recording, and culture. ⁴⁵

In 1926, one artist would create a tidal wave of interest in a new self-accompanied, male derived blues as pop music and serve as a true inspiration for Broonzy: Texas street musician and guitar virtuoso Blind Lemon Jefferson. Jefferson was extremely critical for Broonzy’s identity transformation from rural country fiddler to urban pop musician because Broonzy crafted his own expectations and identity as a blues musician through Lemon Jefferson. From 1926 to 1929, Blind Lemon Jefferson had recorded hundred songs, fifty of which were released on record. This placed him as the most successful solo male blues artist of the early recording period. Jefferson’s recordings and his personal influence on Broonzy, moreover, reflect Broonzy’s own growth as he developed his own style.

Blind Lemon Jefferson set the standard for new generations of blues musicians like Broonzy who molded their identities and their expectations of the blues and its industry based on Jefferson’s model. Jefferson was a star in every sense of the word; he was polished, sophisticated, itinerant, self-accompanied, and well seasoned. His blindness and his southern roots gave him marketability and novelty that few musicians could rival. He wore sharp suites and spectacles; a persona that did not in any way reflect popular imagery of the southern black rube arriving in south Chicago everyday. Musically, Jefferson was markedly different than the Blues empresses who had preceded him as the blues’ top recording artists, because he wrote much of his own material. All of these factors compounded his natural talent and coincided with an enormous growth in the race record industry of the 1920s.

When Broonzy first met Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1925, the Texas bluesman was already a star in the South. Broonzy recalled meeting Jefferson at a rent party in Chicago when Jefferson had been in town to record for Paramount Records. ⁴⁶ More important, Jefferson offered Broonzy a template for shaping his musical identity as a solo male blues performer by offering tutelage and encouragement to a bourgeoning musician trying to gain entry into Chicago’s blues world. Broonzy had bought his first guitar for $1.50 on Maxwell Street’s famous open-air market at approximately the same time he met Jefferson, suggesting that Broonzy was just learning how to transform his knowledge of music from fiddle to guitar. ⁴⁷ Upon their first meeting, Jefferson apparently taught Broonzy about the intonation of the strings on the guitar and offered lessons on, as Broonzy put it, “how to get along with the guitar.” ⁴⁸

Broonzy expected that meeting artists like Jefferson would pay off in the form of either musical knowledge or, with any luck, insight into Chicago’s music industry. This chance meeting between a future blues giant and one already established demonstrates that rent parties and buffet flats were extremely critical for the development of black pop music and musicians’ identities in urban areas. In the South, of course, performances in barrelhouses and juke joints, at picnics and parties, and even on back porches were critical for fostering young blues talent. These informal social gatherings defined when and where young musicians were introduced to the blues and how their identities as blues musicians could be perceived. These venues for cultural exchange, then, followed African Americans into urban areas as tens of thousands of blacks fled the South during the Great Migration. As Broonzy navigated Chicago’s music culture, he expected the fostering of such relationships to propel his career.

Chicago’s blues community, beginning in the late 1920s, was rife with talented blues artists ready to make a name for themselves. Broonzy recalled meeting several southern bluesmen who had come to Chicago to record and happened to be performing in Chicago’s rent party circuit including Jefferson, Blind Blake, Tampa Red, Barbecue Bob, Big Joe Turner, Leroy Carr, Shorty George, Lonnie Johnson, Jim Jackson, and others. ⁴⁹ These individuals, moreover, had recording experience and continually persuaded Broonzy to try his hand. ⁵⁰ These chance meetings and the relationships that developed out of them opened doors for young artists looking to break into Chicago’s blues performance and recording culture.

Broonzy’s first record, an upbeat blues titled “House Rent Stomp,” described the setting, atmosphere, and activities of these extremely important parties and he often reflected on house rent parties and their importance to black musicians and community fellowship:

And those people started to give parties and some Saturday nights they would make enough money to pay the rent, and so they started to call them ‘house rent parties’ because they sold chicken, pig feet, homebrew, chittlins, moonshine whiskey. The musicians didn’t have to buy nothing. ⁵¹

Chicago’s house rent parties and buffet flats helped collectivize the experience of migrants to Chicago. Historian Davarian Baldwin has argued that “[b]uffet flats and rent parties with their soul food dinners and small fees served as alternative sites of cultural production, leisure and labor on the stroll.” ⁵² Black literary stalwart Langston Hughes recalled frequenting many rent party flats:

Where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—where the piano would be augmented by a guitar, or an old clarinet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whisky and good fried fish or steaming chitterlings were sold at very low prices. And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went on until dawn came in at the windows. ⁵³

By befriending individuals with established ties to Chicago’s blues culture, Broonzy expected to both learn their music and take advantage of their connections within the music industry. Of course, this was the era of prohibition, so blues musicians like Broonzy were quite limited by the absence of venues where they might perform. Most of Chicago’s clubs and theaters of the period hired jazz bands to perform to mostly white audiences. Until the repeal of prohibition, buffet flats and rent parties were, in some cases, the only venues for performance for upstarts like Big Bill.

At exactly the same moment when Broonzy was meeting early male blues luminaries like Jefferson, Chicago’s recording industry, with expectations of its own, experienced significant growth. The city’s recording business in the 1920s was dominated by three major labels; Okeh, Paramount, and Brunswick Vocalion. By the mid-1920s, Paramount Records had clearly established a reputation as the most important label with the most popular talent. In 1924, Paramount hired former football star and A&R man J. Mayo “Ink” Williams to head its race record market. Williams proved to be savvy and ruthless in his pursuit of blues talent and he recorded many of the early blues greats including Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Ida Cox, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and an upstart named Big Bill. ⁵⁴ In order to manipulate copyright laws, for example, Williams developed the Chicago Music Publishing Company, which was given credit for all of the recordings he arranged. The creation of this company ensured that Williams received payment for all of the royalties generated by his stable of artists, which could then be given to artists as handouts at his discretion. ⁵⁵ One blues scholar has suggested that most of Williams’s talent, including stalwarts Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, probably never received any money in royalties and were more than likely paid off with flat sums and bottles of whiskey for their work. ⁵⁶ Most recording companies of the era like Paramount frequently took advantage of blues musicians’ naiveté concerning copyright laws and Big Bill Broonzy was no exception.

In 1927, Broonzy recorded his first songs for Williams’s Chicago Paramount office on the corner of Thirty-sixth and State Street after several of Broonzy’s blues acquaintances suggested that he should record. Two of Broonzy’s mentors, Papa Charlie Jackson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, had already recorded for Williams and Paramount records and Broonzy was crafting an identity as a self-accompanied solo blues performer patterned on these two pioneers. The hopes Broonzy developed through meeting these two men were beginning to pay off. Shortly after his introduction to Blind Lemon Jefferson, and upon the recommendation of Charlie Jackson, Broonzy and his friend John Thomas recorded their first Paramount title “Big Bill Blues” and “House Rent Stomp,” under the name “Big Bill and Thomps.” ⁵⁷

Just as Broonzy was beginning to establish his identity and fostering critical relationships within Chicago’s recording and performing industry, the country’s economy collapsed. The Great Depression was devastating for the national recording market and hit the city of Chicago very hard. Recording industry sales had peaked in 1926 at $126 million and plummeted to only $6 million by 1933. ⁵⁸ The situation for Broonzy, however, seemed promising. In 1931, for the first time under his full name, the mistakenly typed “Big Bill Broomsley,” Broonzy had recorded his very first record for Paramount as a solo performer, a ragtime/vaudeville-tinged blues titled “How You Want it Done.” ⁵⁹

The crippling effect of the depression continued. In 1932 Paramount records, the pioneer blues and vaudeville label, failed along with race labels Okeh and Gennett. Most of them had not expected such a quick demise in the historically successful race record market. Paramount’s chief rival Columbia was also on the verge of collapse leaving only fledgling retail store affiliate RCA-Victor, Brunswick/Vocalion, and upstart competitor Decca to absorb dozens of smaller subsidiary labels and their artists within a highly unstable market. Fortunately, these new labels found an already established collection of talent and music in the city of Chicago. ⁶⁰

Essentially, Broonzy and other contemporaries engaged in the construction of Chicago’s music communities were developing a distinct blues culture that would make blues one of the most popular music genres of the twentieth century and epitomize New Settler notions about black autonomy and cultural respectability. Over time, following the Great Depression and the repeal of prohibition, the rent party circuit evolved just as Chicago’s South Side saw the development of legendary blues clubs in the 1930s. Clubs and theaters like Ruby Lee Gatewood’s Tavern, the 1410 Club, The Regal Theatre, The 8th Street Theatre in Chicago and the Town Hall, The Apollo Theater, and Café Society in New York were some of Broonzy’s best gigs and home to many of the country’s best blues talents. Some of these clubs featured performers for five to six hours at a time and were often quite rough and tawdry. ⁶¹ Broonzy even continued to perform on the Chitlin Circuit in the early forties with Chicago-based female artist Lil Green. ⁶² These clubs would become landmark venues for the performance of Chicago blues, and for the working musician then, as Broonzy became in the late twenties and thirties. Record sales rarely produced fruitful financial gains for blues artists of the period, forcing them to perform regularly.

These informal spaces of cultural production provided alternative forms of entertainment that were cheaper than the Jazz clubs on the Stroll, and their tendency towards featuring local blues musicians offered the similar sounds of the worlds they had left behind. Again, events like these were also happening in the South, but in different venues, like juke joints and barrelhouses rather than in urban flats. ⁶³ More important, these dens for cultural exchange and expression demonstrate that musicians like Broonzy were participating in more than just a world of vice. These bluesmen and women were creating a world that directly challenged Old Settler and white progressive ideas about the dangers of Black Metropolis nightlife. Within this nightlife, these artists and musicians eschewed accepted forms of respectability by creating New Settler personalities and developing a culture that was both respectable and exciting for many black Chicagoans, while simultaneously exhibiting accepted Old Settler norms of behavior by returning to their labor and industrial pursuits the very next morning. The emergence of this incredibly vibrant world of leisure, moreover, represented a new alternative to the backbreaking physical labor of both the sharecropping South and northern centers of industry. To be clear, this world of leisure contained specifically dangerous elements that often pitted unscrupulous business practices and a world of vice against southern migrants who were often desperate, naïve, and penniless. Yet, within this world, some African Americans were able to seize the opportunity and develop identities beyond those strictly associated with labor.

Respectability and Authority in Black Chicago

Beyond the world of leisure associated with Chicago’s developing music industry, perhaps the most complex dynamic of the Black Metropolis’s race and class developments was their open ambivalence about southern migrant’s adherence to and/or disregard of prevalent social norms. On the one hand, Chicago’s growing New Settler black bourgeoisie viewed the migrants as potential clients and congregation members who embodied a new direction for the race. Southern migrants, who left the South for higher wages and greater participation in American democracy, represented the growth of a new working class, whose drive and ambitions would elevate blacks’ status to that of a new proletariat. On the other hand, many Old Settler middle-class leaders regarded southern migrants as potentially dangerous.

As new southern migrants arrived in Chicago, they brought many of their old southern pathways with them. Their outward signs of behavior—speech, dress, body language, manners, foodways, and etiquette—as well as their work ethic, living conditions, and child-rearing practices, were all points of criticism and skepticism that the city’s established black leadership regarded as public concern. Led by the Chicago branch of the National Urban League, Bronzeville’s own Defender, and by civic and social organizations like the YMCA, black Chicago’s leadership established dozens of programs “designed to help and pressure the newcomers to adjust” to an urban, northern, and industrial world that would “enhance the reputation of blacks in the lager (white) community.” ⁶⁴ The Chicago Defender revealed these social norms in its “A Few Do’s and Don’ts” column that ran virtual laundry lists of suitable and not-so-suitable public modes of behavior. Most of these pieces focused on appropriate conduct on city streets and public accommodations, sobriety, personal hygiene, public interactions between men and women and authoritative figures, and manners of dress. ⁶⁵

Big Bill Broonzy completely rejected the authoritative suggestions of empowered community leaders’ social norms as he attempted to establish his urbane blues persona. Broonzy once admitted that he would try anything to change his look in hopes of gaining respect outside of the racial stereotypes that defined black behavior in both the North and South. To change his outward appearance from that of the country migrant rube into his new, urbane persona, Broonzy bought a Cadillac, a hundred-dollar suit, a forty-dollar hat, forty-dollar shoes, straightened his hair, changed the way he walked and talked, and altered the way he played guitar and sang songs. He even admitted to dating white women. ⁶⁶ Big, handsome, and impeccably dressed, nearly all of Broonzy’s publicity photos picture a well-dressed, polished, and sophisticated performer. Ultimately, then, Big Bill was participating in the types of open behavior that challenged Old Settler sensibilities about public behavior and respectability while creating a new cultural identity for himself and others in the Black Metropolis. ⁶⁷

Authority figures were quite prevalent in black Chicago including the police, who employed black officers, African American community leaders, white and black business entrepreneurs, organized crime bosses, and even recording company representatives and executives. Collectively, many of these authority figures could help or hinder a migrant’s experience as they navigated a new urban world. The warp and woof of these authority figure’s worldviews, moreover, often established black Chicago’s social norms.

Broonzy’s relationship to authority reveals fascinating degrees of his experience in Chicago and highlights the tensions between Old Settler and New Settler modes of behavior. If his aversion to the authoritative structure of his military experience, the humiliation of Jim Crow segregation, and to the demands of his young wife were significant driving forces behind his migration to Chicago, his life in Chicago exhibits a more nuanced approach to interpersonal power dynamics. As he navigated the city, he was forced to negotiate power relationships in many ways. Employers, record company representatives, night club owners, and house rent party organizers each held positions of authority over Broonzy, and they held the keys that would unlock his potential as an artist and entertainer. Often, he accommodated to their needs and suffered hardship, exploitation, and degradation on their behalf.

By examining the role of authority within the city’s social norms contained in the Old Settler–New Settler dichotomy, Broonzy reveals the fluidity of this paradigm even further as well as his own careful navigation of the city. Often, he applied an accommodationist approach to his interactions with white authority figures in the city’s music business and labor industries in a manner that revealed Old Settler notions of proper race etiquette. And before arriving in Chicago, Broonzy had grown tired of the restraining elements of the military, the Jim Crow South, and family life, yet his relationship to the power dynamics of the recording industry presents a fascinating window into his personality. Before, as a man in his twenties, he had averted his problems with authority by catching the first train out of Arkansas, hoboing his way to Chicago. In his thirties and forties, however, he simply accommodated the unfair treatment from white recording representatives like Lester Melrose and the white-operated recording industry. ⁶⁸ When asked why he was not assertive in his demand for royalties, he would superficially explain that he was often told untruths about the number of his sales, even though he could hear the echoes of his records on phonograph machines throughout his neighborhood and beyond. Yet, as always with Broonzy, his reasoning for not challenging Melrose and others who had taken advantage of him were much deeper and much more personal:

I really don’t want to have no connections with a man that I got to fight him and raise sand to try and get anything out of him for what I’ve done. Until I started in running in this music business, I had never lived around no people that would kill they own brother, like, for a lousy dollar or would rob they own family for a few nickels. I’d always been around people that they making a little something, they’ll give you something, too. So, well, these guys would give me just enough to sort of live on and, by me being the way I am, I just let it go. ⁶⁹

Deference in the Jim Crow South was an invaluable tool for African American’s safety and survival. Perhaps, like many other black migrants, Broonzy employed this social pathway in his new surroundings. Nevertheless, rather than challenge the merciless world of the recording business head on, Broonzy seemed much more comfortable accommodating these betrayals by maintaining his integrity and just “let it go.”

Broonzy also enjoyed praise from authority figures as he navigated Chicago’s labor industries. As a laborer for the WPA, Broonzy recalled relishing the praise from his white boss “Big George” as he laid concrete on 47th street in Chicago. He enjoyed the WPA’s manual work during such difficult times and seemed to accommodate a strong and humorous relationship with his foreman and coworkers. Big George knew Broonzy was a hard worker and could follow orders and openly, even admitting the fact in front of all of the workers. He once reflected that Big George’s respect made him “feel good for the boss to say that in front of the other men not knowing that they was going to have fun out of me.” ⁷⁰ Even though Broonzy had grown tired of deference to plantation bosses in the South, he was more than willing to accommodate to federal employees from the North.

While Broonzy embraced an Old Settler–style work ethic, he simultaneously challenged Old Settler notions of respectability by committing himself to the city’s growing consumer marketplace for recorded and performed music. Broonzy first rejected Old Settler notions of community respectability by quitting his “respectable” job with the Pullman Company and returning to his musical pursuits. He began paling around with local musicians and vaudeville veterans such as “Papa” Charlie Jackson, Ed Strickland, Theodore Edwards, John Thomas, Jeffrey Moore, Frank Braswell, and “a hundred . . . different guys” that he played with during that period. Broonzy had made his first forays into music as a country fiddler in Arkansas, where he had played for segregated weekend picnics. He had never played “for no negroes” until he came to Chicago. Slowly, this New Settler consumer marketplace seduced Broonzy as he transformed his identity from a southern laborer and rural musician into an urban blues guitarist/singer, who worked a day job to supplement his passion for music. ⁷¹

In some ways, Chicago’s thriving blues scene confirmed all of the Old Settler’s fears about the licentious world of the New Settlers. It was a business with shady ethics. Although self-contained and independent of local patronage and Old Settler influence, New Settlers, it seemed, were quite willing to exploit the newly arriving migrants eager to participate in new consumer markets. Broonzy’s introduction to Paramount records demonstrates that Chicago’s developing New Settler spheres of economic and cultural influence made a habit of taking advantage of many recording artists.

In 1925 Broonzy and John Thomas entered “Ink” Williams State Street Paramount Records office ready to record their songs. Broonzy had been practicing his guitar licks and blues lines for a year in hopes that he, like his newfound musician friends, might record their blues for Paramount records. Yet when he arrived at Williams’s office and began playing for the usual crowd that had gathered there, Williams advised Broonzy that he was not ready and that he needed to continue practicing. Williams then scrapped the cuts that Broonzy and Thomas had performed. ⁷² Unbeknownst to Broonzy and Thomas, Williams secretly gave one of the takes, a Broonzy original titled “Gonna Tear It Down,” to fellow Chicago musician Barbecue Bob.

Broonzy remembered, “Barbecue Bob was a guitar player, a pretty good one at the time, and so he gave it to Barbecue Bob and Barbecue Bob made it, called “Tear it Down.” ⁷³ Broonzy openly admitted that there were several musicians in Chicago at the time that were better guitarists, singers, and musicians, and Paramount had a habit of recording musicians’ songs, scrapping the takes, and giving the songs to “better” musicians whose instrumentation and vocal phrasings might sell records more readily. ⁷⁴

Over the next thirty years, Broonzy would record or contribute to over three hundred songs. Yet, this moment in his early music career would also mark the beginning of a lifelong struggle Broonzy would have with the music industry and provides a concrete example of the unethical practices of the burgeoning recording industry. An enormous part of his identity as a bluesman was rooted in his mistrust of the industry and those who operated it. When Broonzy was asked what he made off of his first record, he simply replied: “Well, he (Williams) didn’t pay me anything.” It turns out that his partner, John Thomas, had told Williams “some kinda tale that he had to go down home and bury his father.” ⁷⁵ Williams fronted John Thomas seventy-five dollars in advance, and Big Bill never saw a dime of the money for any of his first recordings.

Music and the Negotiation of Authority

In 1928 Broonzy met Lester Melrose, a local Chicago blues talent scout and promoter who helped establish the early success of Bill’s friends and Chicago giants Tampa Red and “Georgia Tom” Dorsey. ⁷⁶ Melrose and his brother Frank had started a record store and music publishing company in Chicago’s south side in the 1920s. By 1934, Lester Melrose was heading RCA/Victor’s race label Bluebird and Columbia’s race label Okeh, both of which would become an important crucible for the developing Chicago sound of the post-depression 1930s and early 40s. ⁷⁷

When Broonzy met Melrose in 1928, he had just ended his rocky relationship with Paramount’s J. Mayo “Ink” Williams. ⁷⁸ The two would forge one of the most important relationships in American music during the period. As the recording industry began to recover from the Great Depression’s devastation in the early 1930s, important developments within American musical culture had begun to change the black pop music landscape. With the repeal of prohibition and the emergence of the jukebox, Broonzy’s musical world changed forever.

The New Deal brought a new lease on life to the record business. The repeal of Prohibition revitalized the nightclubs and saloons of urban America. Simultaneously, the demand for popular records was stimulated by a new technical innovation, the jukebox, which began to supplant live music in bars and clubs. . . . By 1939, there were 255,000 jukeboxes in operation using 13 million disks. ⁷⁹

The Depression-era audiences of newly established saloons and bars were hungry for the sounds of developing urban blues styles, especially those pulsating from the city of Chicago.

While the vaudeville blues popularized by the classic female blues singers of the early recording era had all but disappeared, traditional rural blues and the emerging urban blues sound were becoming popular. The days of expensive ventures into the South with mobile recording equipment to record local blues talent was over. Many of the South’s best and brightest had left the South during the depression and many found their way to Chicago. New tastes, new record labels, and a large pool of incredibly gifted talent prepared Chicago for the creation of one of the most vibrant and important music cultures in twentieth-century American history. ⁸⁰ Under these auspices, Lester Melrose and Big Bill Broonzy became a powerful combination within Chicago’s blues community. Melrose held expectations for his own vision of Chicago blues markets and Big Bill Broonzy would play an integral part.

Through Melrose, Broonzy met future lifelong friends and musical companions who together built Chicago’s distinct blues sound block by block. These blues greats included Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Washboard Sam, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Memphis Slim, Black Bob, Joshua Altheimer, Sleepy John Estes, “Big” Maceo Meriwether, Jazz Gillum, and many others. ⁸¹ Together they would become as important to the development and maintenance of Broonzy’s identity as Broonzy’s own negotiations of Black Chicago’s leisure world. Melrose production philosophy created a sound that shed the blues’ country roots by adding jazz instrumentation and swinging beats in hopes of appealing to a Great Migration–fueled, ever-expanding audience. Most of Melrose’s musicians appeared on the other’s albums, often as instrumentalists or credited as songwriters, a phenomenon that helped create a distinctly recognizable black pop sound. More importantly, Broonzy and his close friend Washboard Sam became two of Melrose’s most prolific songwriters and were critical for the development of Melrose’s vision. The resulting product, as one scholar has suggested, was quite “formulaic” in its sound. ⁸²

Beginning in 1934, Broonzy’s recordings as an individual performer disappeared as Melrose recognized Broonzy’s obvious, but unpolished talent and persuaded him to perform with accompaniment. Essentially, these two Chicago blues pioneers were forging their career successes and identities by fulfilling their individual expectations of the other. Broonzy expected that Melrose’s extensive experience within Chicago’s music business and his connections with record companies would provide guidance for his own navigation of black popular music. Melrose anticipated that Broonzy’s songwriting, affable personality, dogged persistence, and obvious talent would serve as a critical component for his vision.

Like “Ink” Williams, however, Melrose ensured that nearly all royalties gained from his artists would funnel back in to his own pockets. Leaning on his music production roots, Melrose paid small sums for original compositions created by his talented group of musicians and copyrighted all songs under his own name. Not only did this ensure that he would receive all royalties for Bluebird songs, it also helped keep his artists active, productive, original, and, most important, lucrative. ⁸³

Broonzy’s solo records from the late 1920s had sold poorly, so Melrose began recording Broonzy with ensembles throughout the thirties and into the forties. These “hokum” bands “were made up of guitars, piano, bass, drums, trumpet, saxophone, and occasionally a washboard.” They “produced an upbeat, happy-go-lucky sound closer to the black minstrel and vaudeville musical tradition” than Broonzy’s country blues roots. ⁸⁴ From 1930 to 1932, Big Bill played in dozens of recording sessions issued under his name or as an instrumentalist for other artists. In 1933, as the Great Depression engulfed nearly all aspects of American life, Broonzy, along with many other veteran bluesmen, did not record a single take. ⁸⁵ When Broonzy was paired with pianist Black Bob in March of 1934 his career took an entirely different turn, a turn that Melrose had envisioned. Broonzy’s musicianship, especially his vocal delivery, had evolved dramatically under Melrose. He had lost the gruff tone and projection of his self-accompanied style in favor of a smooth, jazz-like croon. As a result, he quickly began to experience some success as the duo recorded at least on two-dozen different occasions from 1932 to 1937. ⁸⁶ By negotiating Melrose’s vision for a new urban blues sound, Broonzy had transformed himself from a solo male blues shouter in the Blind Lemon Jefferson mold into a smoothed-over, almost jazz-like blues crooner. His vocal phrasings became relaxed, carefully phrased, and wholly confident while his guitar accompaniment remained a subtle companion to Black Bob’s pulsating piano rhythms.

As Broonzy’s reputation grew as an interlocutor of Chicago blues culture in the 1930s and 40s, he too stood as an authority figure for dozens of fledgling musicians, ultimately playing an extremely assertive role in the development of Chicago blues. The juxtaposition of these power dynamics marks a fascinating facet of Broonzy’s life. On the one hand, he was not always assertive and upfront with those who held power over him. Many in the music business (including Ink Williams and Lester Melrose) took advantage of Broonzy throughout his career on a multitude of levels, and only later in life did he challenge these abuses. Conversely, as an authority figure within the Chicago blues community, his warmth, leadership, and devotion to the blues’ younger generations following in his footsteps was nothing less than brilliant. Many younger musicians viewed him as a father figure and harbinger of an expanding blues landscape. Broonzy effortlessly piloted the early careers of recently arrived musicians, offering sage advice and coordinating important introductions.

Dozens of Chicago’s most respected bluesmen cite Broonzy as one of the most important figures in their early Blues careers. The second Great Migration sparked thousands of Southerners to migrate to Chicago during the 1940s and many of Chicago’s all-time famous blues artists moved to Chicago during the period. Upon their arrival, these emigrants found an older generation of migrants who were well established in the city and its music culture. In Big Bill Broonzy, many migrant musicians found a generous and affable veteran of the Chicago scene who knew the appropriate individuals within the city’s club circuit as well as the city’s evolving recording company market and its “transition from art to industry.” ⁸⁷

The list of aspiring artists affected by Broonzy’s warmth and generosity is immense: Muddy Waters, Homesick James, J.B. Lenoir, Tommy McClennan, Johnny Williams, Floyd Jones, Jimmy Rogers, Washboard Sam, Memphis Slim, and probably many others all viewed Broonzy as an inimitable influence. J.B. Lenoir suggested that Broonzy treated him “like a son,” while Muddy Waters once proclaimed that Broonzy “helped me to get my start” when he arrived in Chicago in 1943. ⁸⁸ As an authority figure for young and upcoming blues artists, then, Broonzy was nothing less than a stalwart. As a burgeoning authority figure within the world of Chicago blues, he often exhibited New Settler modes of behavior establishing his own blues persona and by openly recruiting and fostering young blues talent in hopes of perpetuating the city’s music culture in a manner that kept Chicago’s blues community vibrant. While Broonzy continued to navigate the fluid boundaries of black Chicago’s social norms as they related to authority figures, his experiences also reflect the permeable borders of the city’s sexuality and his own masculinity as well.

Gender and Sexuality in the Black Metropolis

Broonzy’s negotiation of black masculinity and femininity in Chicago’s Black Metropolis provides fascinating insight into the transforming sexual world of African Americans in the early twentieth century. Outside of the world of music, Broonzy also negotiated the social norms between Old Settler notions of black womanhood and whites’ general belief in black men and women’s proclivities towards promiscuity and immorality in a similar accommodating and assertive manner. African-American women’s roles in the development of the Black Metropolis serve as another point of contention between Old Settler and New Settler modes of respectability and social norms. To be sure, during the 1920s and 30s, issues of “[a]appropriate womanhood and domesticity became . . . powerful symbols for the success or failure of Old Settler respectability.” ⁸⁹ Old Settlers began crafting an image around Chicago’s black women that defied white’s generally held stereotypes of black “promiscuity and general immorality” by developing a new cultural image rooted within “Victorian femininity” and centered on black women’s increasing roles as sources of domesticity, morality, and reform. ⁹⁰

Broonzy’s own sense of masculinity, in some ways stemmed from two separate elements. First, his race consciousness and his experiences in the South had taught him about the frequently hypocritical, racialized sexual mores of southern white men and the subsequent emasculation of black men that often lay at the center of southern racism. Besides being branded as a “boy” or “uncle,” and thereby removed of any recognition of manhood bestowed upon adult males, black men like Broonzy had to face the often-humiliating double standard of southern white men’s own interracial sexual activities. Some white men in the South might threaten to kill a black man for even hinting at sexual advancement toward white women, even though the same violent perpetrator might be having an affair with a black mistress. ⁹¹ Broonzy understood this quite well:

You take there is a negro woman down there that’s nice-lookin . . . and they wants a negro man for there husband. But the white man want her. So now for her to live and her family to get along alright and to be satisfied down there and keep whatsoever there family’s got, like a home or they got a little property or something like that around there you know. Well now this white man, if he want the Negro woman, then whoensoever this Negro that’s got her, he gotta give her up. ⁹²

The coupling of Broonzy’s own race pride with his sense of manhood had begun even before he had arrived in Chicago. Once there, however, the city would offer even more transformative pathways for black manhood and womanhood in the United States that would reverberate well into the twentieth century.

Broonzy and other blues pioneers of the period, immersed within Chicago’s vibrant black community, witnessed important changes in black sexuality that only the backdrop of the city could provide. The tensions created by the black migrant experience were gripping and exciting to both the bluesmen and women who pioneered the music and to those who chose to participate in its consumer marketplace, and, as one scholar contends, of all these new tensions “none were stronger than those around sex.” ⁹³

In cities across the North and South, migration generated highly visible and novel social formations: rooming houses full of unattached black women (at the turn of the century black women formed the majority of black migrants fleeing the South), and vibrant communities of black lesbians and gay men. The most striking representatives of those groups—the sexually unfettered, independent black woman, the visibly effeminate, “freakish” gay man—aroused tensions over female autonomy, familial authority and the boundaries of “normal” manhood that echoed through inter-war African-American culture. ⁹⁴

The sensational sexuality of the interwar blues period defined many of Broonzy’s most popular numbers—like his “Horny Frog” Blues, “I Want My Hand on It,” and “Flat Foot Susie with Her Flat Yes, Yes”—and this sexuality became part of his modern, urban personality. To be clear, this process was one of negotiation. Often, the sexuality of his urbane persona clashed with the southerner who held the utmost respect for a mother who had taught him important lessons about respect for the opposite sex. But soon he realized, that in the city, once he “got rid of one” he always had “another one in sight.” ⁹⁵

In some ways, then, the dichotomous nature of Broonzy’s own masculinity represents Old Settler social norms by accommodating a seemingly respectful attitude toward the women in his life. Although he traveled frequently for both work and his music, he always tried to take care of the women in his inner sphere. As an itinerant blues performer moving from town to town, Broonzy usually provided financial support for his family in order to help maintain a solid domestic life for his wives and their children. Broonzy was married at least four times to four different women. He married his first wife Gertrude in 1914, he appears in the 1930 census with a wife named Annie, and at his death was married to a woman named Rosa, whom he married in 1940, and married another woman named Rose in the 1950s. ⁹⁶ In 1941 he traveled for nearly two months with Lil’ Green’s Traveling Road Show, making approximately fifty dollars a week. Of that fifty dollars, Broonzy sent his wife whatever he had left over from road expenses, which usually amounted to ten or fifteen dollars. From 1944 to 1945, he often appeared at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and Greenwich Village’s Café Society, making $250 and $165 dollars a week, respectively. Each week he again sent Rosie fifty dollars to help make ends meet. ⁹⁷

Even as a professional musician, Broonzy held deep respect for many female blues singers and had worked with a number of them, including Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Georgia White, and Hazel Scott. ⁹⁸ Of all of his female blues colleagues, he spoke the most reverently of “Memphis” Minnie Douglas. To Broonzy, Minnie’s guitar virtuosity was unparalleled; he believed she could “pick a guitar and sing as good as any man” he had ever heard. ⁹⁹ He once reportedly faced Memphis Minnie in a blues contest on his birthday in 1933. With a crowded house looking on, Broonzy played two songs, much to the delight of an audience that cheered and clapped for nearly ten minutes. The house fell silent as Minnie took the stage, as the predominantly male audience and judges’ panel had never heard her perform. Minnie awed the crowd with her unprecedented guitar skill and vocal delivery, ultimately winning the contest and Broonzy’s respect for the remainder of his life. ¹⁰⁰

In a manner akin to Old Settler ideals about public respectability, he was never openly aggressive with women on Chicago’s city streets, and he often scoffed at others who sexually harassed women in public or coveted another man’s wife or girlfriend. In his autobiography, he lamented that he wished to be remembered by history as happy when drinking whiskey and partying with women. To be sure, Bill certainly had many women, as did his contemporaries. Yet, he insisted to Alan Lomax that he was always slow with women and was never inclined to sleep around. Broonzy always had his own woman and never felt the need to covet another man’s girlfriend or spouse. Too often he had witnessed what happened when his friends had “bothered the other man’s woman” and insisted that he was never flirtatious with unacquainted females. ¹⁰¹

His opinions on monogamy, however, suggest that he understood the reality and power of seduction, and, if his lady was “sneakin out,” he never worried about it as long as she did not make it obvious. Quite bluntly, as long as he “got service,” he seemed little concerned about her transgressions. ¹⁰² Broonzy’s historical trail, moreover, reveals him as a man who concretized both Old Settler and white fears about black promiscuity, infidelity, and immorality. Although married throughout most of his adult life to four different women, he had many lovers, held ambivalent views on the nature of monogamy, and, perhaps, was a serial polygamist.

In at least two countries in Europe, two women appear to have been Broonzy’s love interests. In a letter to Alan Lomax from April of 1953 he confessed living with a woman named Jacqueline in Paris whom he was ready to marry. Broonzy had written Lomax, then living in Scotland, to find two “white plain” shirts and “2 rings” for their upcoming wedding. Broonzy relied on Jacqueline to mediate financial transactions, suggesting that she would repay Lomax for the purchases upon delivery. ¹⁰³ The letter reveals an introspective Broonzy who seemed at ease espousing religious and philosophical quips to his friend and even joking that he was “still alive and still singing the blues . . . and making love to a beautiful woman.” ¹⁰⁴

From 1955 until his death, he maintained a significant relationship with a Dutch woman named Pim Van Isveldt, with whom he had a son named Michael who still lives in Amsterdam today. Throughout their brief relationship from 1955 until his death in 1958 Broonzy continually attempted to persuade Pim to marry him and sent money for she and their son whenever he could. He had met Pim on his first tour of the Netherlands, perhaps the most beloved country he ever toured. From 1955 to 1958 he corresponded with her in a series of over fifty love letters. ¹⁰⁵

Perhaps his most constant female relationship was that of his mother, who died in 1957 at the age of 102. ¹⁰⁶ Mittie Belcher remained a strong influence in Broonzy’s life from his birth until her death: “I was the kind of a boy that I was crazy ’bout my mother, I always was.” ¹⁰⁷ While living in Chicago, Bill often returned to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit his mother, and in 1939 Bill bought her a house in Arkansas with the money he made as a foundry laborer. ¹⁰⁸ In March of 1954 Broonzy had written friend and European jazz critic Yannick Bruynoghe explaining that white bankers from Little Rock had placed a lien on Broonzy’s mother’s home to pay for his brother’s cotton and corn crop for the next two growing seasons. A severe drought devastated the crop along with any hopes of repaying the loan. The house that Broonzy had worked so hard to provide for his one-hundred-year-old mother was in jeopardy of foreclosure. His brother, at that point, was too old to find work, so Broonzy, at age sixty-one, humbly wrote his European friend that he would “have to go and get a job” because he had “no money to pay the debt with.” ¹⁰⁹ One of the most commercially recorded blues artists in history who had brought African American blues to Europe, helped create Chicago’s blues community, played Carnegie Hall, and was a key element in the burgeoning American and European white folk and jazz revival, was about to sell himself to a southern gang labor camp to make ends meet! He was not sure what type of labor he would be subjected to, but he knew the experience would “be just like being in jail.” ¹¹⁰

Big Bill and the Black Past

Broonzy’s navigation of these social norms within black Chicago reveals significant cultural negotiations taking place in the Black Metropolis. These negotiations, moreover, wholly contribute to a historical understanding of Broonzy, his contemporaries, and their culture. These anecdotes and examples provide a lens through which to view the lived history of blues entertainers like Broonzy that moves beyond hagiographic investigations of blues culture and music. To be sure, Big Bill Broonzy did achieve celebrity status, and was musician and bluesman to his very core. But focusing solely on his music and career undermines the important historical actions that his life details. Like the tens of thousands of southern black migrants who came to northern centers of industry and a burgeoning African American culture, Big Bill Broonzy was forced to navigate a new way of life that often straddled, clashed, and mirrored prevalent customs of race, class, and acceptable social norms.

Within this rapidly changing environment, Broonzy treaded lightly between a world of black and white Old Settler ideas with those brought from the South by New Settlers, whose approaches to community development and racial respectability often clashed. On the one hand, Broonzy worked in the city’s various industries throughout his life in the manner that Old Settlers believed would be the pathway to racial and social respectability in the United States and Chicago. Furthermore, he maintained close associations with the white-operated recording industry, maintaining proper relationships to white patronage that Old Settlers deemed critical for the development of black Chicago. On the other hand, Broonzy soon became involved in the music world of black Chicago that many Old Settlers believed to be a contributing factor to a developing “Negro Problem” in the city. The blues clubs, rent party circuits, and brothels of Chicago in which Broonzy often traveled and his public modes of behavior provided an example of what some viewed as community degradation and the wrong directions for the race. Yet to others, their activities represented a new respectability; centers for a new type of leisure industry centered on black creativity and entrepreneurial professionalism that would define the “Black Metropolis” in Chicago and help establish new identities in an emerging black urban consciousness. In short, Broonzy subscribed to New Settler ideas about acceptable forms of public behavior while he also reinforced white beliefs about black promiscuity and infidelity.

To many scholars of the metropolis, African Americans fell into one of these two camps—Old Settler or New Settler—and many of the studies on these intercommunity dynamics place the problem in a negative light. Big Bill Broonzy, however, and probably many others, straddled both sides of this paradigm. By doing so, he reveals a fascinating component of the Black Metropolis.