The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy by Kevin D. Greene

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy by Kevin D. Greene Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy. By Kevin D. Greene. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 226. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4649-7; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4648-0.) Origin stories that anchor blues authenticity to tropes of culturally isolated African American male guitarists from the Mississippi Delta region remain so deeply ingrained in American popular music memory that it is reasonable for scholars to approach blues biographies with an air of skepticism and genuine hope for repurposing stories that challenge biographical caricatures. Kevin D. Greene’s thoughtful depiction of Big Bill Broonzy (born Lee Conley Bradley) sidesteps these trappings by mapping American demographic shifts and commercial music developments onto Broonzy’s lived geography. Greene describes his research as a recovery act that stretches public memory of this Chicago bluesman beyond Broonzy’s influence on white rock musicians during blues revivals. The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy carefully situates Broonzy in a continuum of twentieth-century black [End Page 500] intellectuals and meditates on the development of a modern African American musical consciousness in relationship to Jim Crow urbanization. The most salient lesson Greene imparts is that Broonzy’s life story offers one route to understanding how black music flourished under the weight of Jim Crow. The book captures Broonzy’s conscious fashioning of sound and image, while moving between cosmopolitan centers and reacting to music industry shifts, during a period when social structures were designed to subordinate black men. Drawing from interviews, archival manuscripts, and memorabilia, the book follows a chronological framework that reconciles Broonzy’s public and private identities while describing the social impact of musical celebrity in Chicago and white fascination with black bluesmen. Greene’s overview of the Great Migration depicts the birth and circulation of early commercial blues as an employment path for those with little economic mobility, thus complicating the genre’s relationship to race, gender, industry, and leisure. Broonzy was one of thousands of African Americans to relocate to Chicago at a critical moment during the Great Migration, when the blues craze transformed the city into a national music center. The blues emerges as a story of contested urban encounters and purposeful melding of preexisting ideas and musical practices from tent shows, vaudeville, churches, and sheet music rags. Professional music making was understood as an opportunity for greater autonomy and as an escape from hard manual labor for a talented few, but it required careful timing and socialization during racist, anti-immigrant, and antilabor movements that segregated Chicago’s South Side and West Side neighborhoods. Music did not enable Broonzy or his contemporaries to transcend social struggles, but it provided an alternative mechanism with which they navigated perilous terrains. Greene details Broonzy’s command of the Chicago music scene when unemployment patterns pushed working-age men to other cities, technological developments caused record sales to surpass live performance revenues, and consumer preferences leaned toward the grittier sounds of Muddy Waters. Greene argues that Broonzy gets lost in dominant blues histories because he refused to abandon established black fan bases and his urban blues stylings in pursuit of more lucrative white music communities. Broonzy’s departure from dominant music industry trends makes this biography a compelling case study about musical agency. Musicologists know well the troubles of tracking music biographies with chameleon-like narrative shifts, archival holes, exaggerations, and offensive racialized promotional materials. Yet contemporary biographers who confront these challenges illuminate the depth of political, cultural, socioeconomic, and artistic change that is indexed by individual musicians. The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy dissects our motivations for remembering or forgetting individual musicians and ethically documents social and cultural networks that can aid our ability to understand human creativity in relation to the passing of time. [End Page 501] Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment University of Virginia Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association