Big Bill Broonzy

Big Bill Broonzy
Studio portrait of Broonzy
Background information
Birth name	Lee Conley Bradley
Also known as	Big Bill Broonzy, Big Bill Broomsley
Born	(1893-06-26)June 26, 1893 (disputed) Lake Dick, Arkansas, United States or Scott, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	August 14, 1958(1958-08-14) (aged 65) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Genres	Folk music, country blues, Chicago blues, spirituals, protest songs
Occupation(s)	Musician, songwriter, sharecropper, preacher
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, fiddle
Years active	1927–1958
Labels	Paramount, ARC, Bluebird, Vocalion, Folkways
Associated acts	Papa Charlie Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger

Big Bill Broonzy (June 26, 1893 or 1903 – August 14 or 15, 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.

Born Lee Conley Bradley, he was one of the seventeen children of Frank Broonzy (Bradley) and Mittie Belcher. The date and place of his birth are disputed. Broonzy claimed to have been born in Scott, Mississippi, but a body of emerging research compiled by the blues historian Robert Reisman suggests that he was born in Jefferson County, Arkansas. Broonzy claimed he was born in 1893, and many sources report that year, but family records discovered after his death suggested that the year was 1903. Soon after his birth the family moved to an area near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Bill spent his youth. He began playing music at an early age. At the age of 10 he made himself a fiddle from a cigar box and learned how to play spirituals and folk songs from his uncle, Jerry Belcher. He and a friend, Louis Carter, who played a homemade guitar, began performing at social and church functions. These early performances included playing at "two-stages": picnics where whites and blacks danced at the same event, but with different stages for blacks and whites.

On the understanding that he was born in 1898 rather than earlier or later, sources suggest that in 1915, 17-year-old Broonzy was married and working as a sharecropper. He had given up playing the fiddle and had become a preacher. There is a story that he was offered $50 and a new violin if he would play for four days at a local venue. Before he could respond to the offer, his wife took the money and spent it, so he had to play. In 1916 his crop and stock were wiped out by drought. Broonzy went to work locally until he was drafted into the Army in 1917. He served for two years in Europe during the First World War. After his discharge from the Army in 1919, he returned to the Pine Bluff area, where he is reported to have been called a racial epithet and told by a white man he knew before the war that he needed to "hurry up and get his soldier uniform off and put on some overalls." He immediately left Pine Bluff and moved to the Little Rock area. A year later, in 1920, he moved north to Chicago in search of opportunity.