Abstract
Blues musicians are not usually seen as imaginative dreamers. The mythic bluesman is rough and untutored, and the music itself often seems to convey a life of raw pain and earthy pleasure—too rooted in the immediate cares of a hard world to dream too far beyond it. Yet we needn’t always take blues myths too literally. Legendary performer Robert Johnson, credited as the composer of “Sweet Home Chicago,” most likely never lived there. Sonny Boy Williamson II, who may be best remembered for having stolen the name of an unrelated predecessor, nevertheless wrote some uniquely inventive lyrics, such as these lines from “Unseeing Eye”: “That unseeing eye reminds me of a midnight dream/It reminds me of somebody I haven’t ever seen.” And it’s worth noting that Big Bill Broonzy’s most famous composition—“Just a Dream”—featured an imagined visit to the Oval Office: “Dreamed I was in the White House, sittin’ in the president’s chair/I dreamed he’s shaking my hand, and he said, ‘Bill, I’m so glad you’re here’” (Greene, p. 83). Blues musicians, in other words, have always understood their worldly musicmaking to convey more far-reaching and fanciful dreams.
A historical focus on Chicago offers a rich opportunity to explore the hopes and dreams that multiple generations of blues performers attached to their music, along with the myriad styles in which these musicians expressed themselves. Chicago blues, a term referring to the electrified post–World War II style exemplified by musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Otis Rush, has come to represent the city’s blues sound for much of the past half-century. Rough-textured, pulsing, and aggressive, Chess recordings like “Rolling Stone” (Waters, 1950) and “Smokestack Lightning” (Wolf, 1956) reworked the spare, drone-like style of an earlier generation’s Mississippi Delta blues in ways that excited black urban audiences of the 1950s north and south. These recordings, in turn, exerted a profound influence on generations of rock ‘n’ rollers to come. Retaining their expressive power even today, they provide an irresistible soundtrack for historical explorations of the struggles and aspirations of Chicago’s South and West Side communities in the early postwar decades.
Yet the outsized status of “Chicago blues” in the pop-culture firmament can obscure the evolving qualities of blues music as well as its complex relation to other genres, such as jazz, pop, rock, and gospel. Blues styles in Chicago were continually in flux for much of the twentieth century, their changes driven by new migrants, new marketplace demands, and newly invented musical traditions. Broonzy, a widely recognized (and often misrecognized) representative of Chicago blues for over thirty years, offers a rich example of the music’s mutable character and the canny ability of a single performer to change with it.
Broonzy is recalled today not only as a towering figure on the Chicago scene but as one of the most successful blues performers of the twentieth century. Historian Kevin Greene builds on Bob Riesman’s fine biography of Broonzy to explore the musician’s ever-shifting performance identities over the course of a remarkably long and varied career. 1 Born Lee Conley Bradley sometime around 1900, Broonzy grew up as part of a sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas, where he taught himself to play the fiddle and soaked up the rich musical life of the region. At a young age one of the best musicians around, he soon discovered the advantages of performing for the boss’s family and friends while, as he put it later, “other Negroes had to work in the hot sun” (p. 19). He also encountered, though, the resentment of poor whites as well as the surveillance of white landowners eager to keep “their” musicians from straying, or even from playing for black audiences at all.
Reliable detail about Broonzy’s early musical development remains in short supply. Greene briefly characterizes the musician’s initial work as that of a country fiddler who performed waltzes, reels, rags, and two-steps for picnics, dances, and church congregations. However, blues music was also emerging as a distinct genre at this time, and Broonzy was strongly drawn to it. Early blues was a complex amalgam of rural southern styles filtered through the “ideas and aspirations” (p. 23) of ragtime, vaudeville, and other urban commercial musics of the period. Disseminated through traveling shows and a burgeoning sheet-music industry, blues music spread throughout the South and beyond over the first two decades of the twentieth century. For Broonzy, as for many southern black musicians of his generation, the new music offered not simply a new sound but a powerful and sustained commentary on “the human condition of Blacks in a segregated world” (p. 23) as well as a pathway that beckoned beyond it. No longer willing to put up with the humiliations of southern Jim Crow after serving overseas in World War I, Broonzy left Arkansas in 1921 and made a new home for himself in Chicago. Switching to guitar, he soon launched a career that took him through a shifting array of musical identities over the course of three-plus decades.
Greene’s focus on his subject’s life-long process of “invention and reinvention” makes for a fascinating account. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Broonzy’s musical identity repeatedly took new shape, “from old-time fiddler to country blues artist to black pop artist to American folk revivalist and European jazz and blues artist” (p. 5). These reinventions tell us much about the changing demands of the music industry and Broonzy’s own savvy ability to navigate and even influence a white-led marketplace. They also offer interesting insights into twentieth-century Chicago. The Windy City loomed large throughout his career, in part because its evolving musical scenes offered a rich succession of possible styles and genres through which to play the blues. While Greene sometimes relies on broad generalities rather than a deep focus on Broonzy’s everyday life and musicmaking, he does explore with texture and nuance key moments in the performer’s musical development. Encounters with Papa Charlie Jackson and Blind Lemon Jefferson in the mid-1920s spurred Broonzy’s transformation from a country fiddler playing South Side house-rent parties to a guitar-picking blues performer and recording artist—precisely at a moment when the white-led “race-record” industry was beginning to record and market a new “racialized romantic ideal” (p. 61): the solo male country-blues musician.
During the early 1930s, Broonzy reinvented himself again. New conditions in Chicago—a revived club scene, the jukebox, the presence of well-capitalized race-record subsidiaries—undergirded the growing popularity of so-called urban blues, a style that borrowed elements of jazz and pop music (such as larger ensembles and swing rhythms) to convey a more urbane, sophisticated sound. Broonzy’s recordings for Lester Melrose’s Bluebird label, a subsidiary of RCA Victor, established him as a major commercial artist as well as a musical leader of Chicago’s blues community. Beyond his increasingly polished vocal and guitar technique, the lyrics of his compositions began to take on a wider array of topics, from politics, racism, and city life to natural disasters, religion, and industrial labor.
Broonzy’s next career move took him in a different direction. In 1938, the white music producer John Hammond enlisted him to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall as part of a revue called From Spirituals to Swing. Intent on conveying a particular narrative of black musical development, Hammond introduced Broonzy as a fresh-off-the-farm Arkansas sharecropper who embodied the country-blues style of mythic guitarist Robert Johnson. It was Broonzy’s first time performing for white audiences in an elevated setting, and his performance of “Just a Dream,” with its wistful egalitarian fantasy of a White House visit, connected powerfully with Hammond’s civil-rights-conscious audience. This was a historic moment, not only for Broonzy—whose career would be increasingly defined by white middle-class musical tastes—but also for an emerging folk-music revival movement, for which he became an exemplary figure.
Immediately after World War II, Broonzy’s recordings found him eagerly embracing jump blues, rhythm-and-blues, and other up-to-date stylings of the urban commercial music world. He also became a close mentor to Muddy Waters and many other rising stars of the electrified blues style just beginning to be associated with Chicago’s Chess Records. But it was the city’s folk-music-revival pioneers, such as Studs Terkel and Win Stracke, who pulled Broonzy out of semi-retirement in the early 1950s to headline “I Come for to Sing,” their traveling music revue. And it was white archivist and promoter Alan Lomax who recast him in the mold of Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) as a “primitive blues singer” (p. 101), solidifying Broonzy’s reputation as a rescued artifact of musical Americana. As Greene puts it, Broonzy’s earliest recordings for a commercial genre that had been established by the race-records industry somehow made him, decades later, a preeminent exemplar of America’s authentic folk-music tradition. European promoters, as well, insisted throughout the 1950s that he perform in overalls as an old-fashioned folk-blues musician, energetically resisting any efforts by Broonzy to share the sophisticated, jazz-tinged blues music he had once pioneered in black Chicago. And it wasn’t just white promoters who ended up pigeon-holing him: When Broonzy died in 1958, Ebony magazine’s obituary labeled him as “one of the last of the shouting blues singers”—thereby congealing his reputation as a down-home throwback. 2
Billy Boy Arnold’s memoir, ably co-written with Kim Field, provides a satisfying counterpoint to Greene’s book on Broonzy’s metamorphoses. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is an engaging and well-written first-person account of a musician’s life in the Chicago blues scene of the 1940s and 1950s. Arnold himself, a harmonica player and vocalist, was born and raised in Chicago and has never lived elsewhere. He enjoyed mostly mid-level commercial success during this period, and the immediate appeal of the book for many readers will center on his frequent encounters and working relationships with major figures on the scene, such as Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Bo Diddley. But what is striking about Arnold’s memoir—in addition to his extraordinarily precise recall—is the unchanging nature of his ambition: to make blues records in the style of his hometown idol, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson (the original one). If Broonzy’s career involved continual reinvention along an ever-winding road, Arnold’s musical life has taken the form of an unwavering pursuit of a relentlessly local childhood dream.
Much more than a hanger-on in the 1940s Chicago blues scene, Arnold was an ambitious teen who seems to have willed himself into a good-enough harmonica player, combo leader, and steady fixture at the better local clubs. He collaborated (and sometimes competed) with many of the biggest hit-makers of the day, and for a brief period he even flirted with genuine stardom. But beyond Arnold’s rare mix of eyewitness testimony with outsider honesty, what emerges most strongly from The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is a portrait of Chicago that is both affectionate and remarkably exact. Arnold’s account of the West Side blues scene in particular moves beyond the usual focus on Maxwell Street to offer fine-grained portraits of various West Madison Street clubs. His stories convey the roughness and violence of the scene but also its musical and even economic vitality.
Arnold’s account focuses effectively on the exploitation experienced by many mid-twentieth-century blues musicians: the low pay, the loss of ownership over songs, the struggle for royalties, the short-term calculus and poor treatment meted out by most record producers. It’s not an unfamiliar story, but his own encounters with record producer Leonard Chess in particular are fascinating, revealing yet again the tangled relationship between the storied record label and “its” blues musicians—a role in which Leonard himself played gatekeeper and promoter, champion and exploiter, commercial genius and clumsy fumbler. The young Arnold, taking offense at a dismissive comment by the label owner, turned away from a promising recording opportunity with Chess and took his material instead to Vee-Jay Records, a less savvy local outfit. Arnold now wonders regretfully how differently his own career might have turned out if he had swallowed his pride on that fateful day. His assessment of Leonard Chess himself, though, is typically generous, registering sincere admiration for the label owner’s willingness to invest long-term in his most prized performers—to their mutual benefit, both musically and commercially.
Arnold is hardly the first practitioner or commentator to extol the deep connection between black racial identity and the electrified Delta-inspired style that came to be known as Chicago blues. The piercing, hypnotic sound created by so many postwar Chicago blues artists conveyed, if nothing else, the profound historical connection between the African American rural South—a Jim Crow world of racist violence and musical vitality—and its northern urban counterpart in Chicago. Yet Arnold’s memoir makes this point compellingly, in part because he offers it up as a local observation grounded in his experience of the city but also because it illuminates the pull of his own particular dream. His professional coming-of-age happened to coincide with a final moment when blues music in Chicago was made mostly by and for black people—and when black Chicago was an undisputed center of that musical world. Beginning with Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” (released by Chess Records in 1955), the commercial appeal of a teen-oriented rhythm-and-blues music to the white market would set in motion the beginnings of a new era.
Steve Cushing’s book of interviews with musicians ranges far and wide across this Chicago history. Cushing, longtime host of the well-regarded public radio show Blues Before Sunrise, is a comfortable long-form interviewer, and his subjects seem to open up easily, telling good stories that often convey the texture of their careers and their everyday lives. Despite the term “blues” in the book title, Cushing’s interviewees include performers whose music is more than a little tinged with jazz or gospel or rhythm and blues—an inclusiveness that is very much to the book’s benefit.
Onetime blues crooner Andrew Tibbs, who scored several hits with a series of late 1940s recordings for Aristocrat (a predecessor label to Chess Records), looks back with Cushing decades later on his brief, heady days of success. Tibbs’s father was a local minister, and his early vocal training came from teenaged choir director Ruth Jones, who soon entered the club circuit under the name of Dinah Washington. When the young Tibbs made a similar move, he quickly absorbed the local jazz styles; several of his Aristocrat sides, in fact, were recorded with Sonny Blount (later known as Sun Ra) on piano. Despite the sharp moral boundary drawn at the time between religious and secular musicmaking, stylistic influence ran in both directions, and Tibbs’s light, sweet way with the blues appealed for a short while to black listeners in northern and southern markets. So did his biggest hit, “Bilbo Is Dead,” which offered up a mock-dirge for recently departed white-supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. Yet lines such as “Since Mr. Bilbo is dead/It makes me feel like a fatherless child” were not quite deadpan enough to get past the broadcasting censors, and the song failed to get radio play in either part of the country.
Several other Cushing interviewees suggest, like Tibbs, the deep influence of church backgrounds on black Chicago musicians of the postwar period. Interestingly, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a Pentecostal faith not always recognized as a source of twentieth-century black musical innovation, looms large in two of these accounts. F. W. McGee, Jr., like his father a COGIC minister, relates the key role of the latter’s sermons, first recorded for RCA Victor in the 1920s, in providing the denomination with an early foothold in northern cities such as Chicago. In another interview, the Pastor Donald Gay offers a highly personal account of the lives and careers of his older siblings, The Gay Sisters, a well-known gospel trio of the 1950s. Raised in a COGIC household, the young women grew up being able to sing “sweet songs” as well as “house-rockers” (p. 84), and, despite church leaders’ ambivalence, the group increasingly incorporated jazz and blues stylings into their gospel recordings. Indeed, much like innovator Sister Rosetta Tharpe but in a very different style, the postwar gospel sound of the Gay Sisters drew on a novel mix of religious and secular musical sources—further evidence that, for many creative mid-century Chicago artists, commercial genre boundaries were fairly arbitrary and success often came about in spite of them. 3
The stories relayed by Cushing’s subjects are not always happy ones. Encounters with harsh racism, both on the road and in Chicago, were routine and debilitating. “Song theft”—by black and white producers alike—was apparently too common to generate much protest. Willie Dixon, the legendary songwriter and producer who did as much as Leonard Chess to shape the sound of 1950s-era Chicago blues, seems to have been similarly prone to give himself sole copyright for what were mostly other people’s compositions.
A final interview in the volume, with Collenane Cosey, provides a brief twist on such an experience. Cosey once wrote a composition called “Ration Blues,” which won a World War II–era songwriting contest sponsored by rhythm-and-blues star Louis Jordan. Jordan seems to have generated fresh material for himself this way; in this case, he never even provided her with a copy of the record. Several decades later, though, she gratefully acquired one from Cushing after her son Pete Cosey (himself a multi-genre guitar virtuoso) happened to hear the radio host play the song on his show. Collenane’s story provides an apt encapsulation of at least two dimensions of the mid-twentieth-century Chicago blues world: the exploitation that often ruled the marketplace but also the community spirit that sometimes tempered its hardest edges.
David Whiteis’s Blues Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Chicago takes the story of the city’s blues musicians up to the present moment. His chapters effectively convey how the styles of so many of these musicians have shifted over the years in response to evolving audience tastes and broader social changes. By the same token, Whiteis emphasizes their surprisingly varied trajectories, from “inheritors” of the blues tradition like Shemekia Copeland and Sugar Blue (who once played with jazz futurists Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk) to younger talents such as the deep-thinking Melody Angel and the Hendrix-inspired Jamiah Rogers. Like Cushing’s collection of interviews, Blues Legacy emphasizes the musical diversity that marches forward today under the banner of the blues, as performers draw from myriad styles—past and present—while espousing an invigorating array of musical visions. One result is that no stable boundaries settle in around the music, and the different perspectives on what constitutes “authentic” or “innovative” twenty-first-century blues styles emerge largely from the voices of the musicians themselves.
Whiteis offers a helpful overview, one that not only points to subgenres but also locates the core tensions and common ground that run through these varied perspectives. Blues musicians have always struggled with the competing pressures of developing an identifiable style that nevertheless has mass-commercial appeal; of honoring the tradition while remaining contemporary; of retaining the black cultural specificity of a music that also addresses universal human concerns. Blues audiences became increasingly white over the past half-century. And as today’s blues musicians also find themselves increasingly distant from the historically specific conditions that first gave rise to the music, navigating those tensions has become more challenging—but the range of possible ways of doing so successfully seems ever more open. While Whiteis offers ample evidence that something called a Chicago blues tradition continues to endure, his volume also provides the many musicians who claim to work within this tradition the space to define the music—and to dream with it—as they please.