Black History Month: Big Bill Broonzy: ‘The Moppin’ Blues’

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Black History Month: Big Bill Broonzy: ‘The Moppin’ Blues’
February 20, 2010
By Laura Millsaps
The Tribune

Chicago blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy’s life and music took him from Scotts, Miss., where he was born, to Arkansas, Chicago and Europe. But he also lived and worked in Ames for a time.

Born in 1898 to a mother who had been raised in slavery, he spent most of his childhood in Pine Bluff, Ark. He began his music career like many blues artists, learning to play from friends and family members, and performing at local churches and social functions.

An Army draft sent him to Europe during World War I, and soon after leaving the service, he gave up his hometown job as a sharecropper and moved to Chicago.

In Chicago, Broonzy performed at clubs and social events while working odd jobs. His skill with a guitar gradually brought him recording contracts for southern blues, Negro spirituals and folk songs in the 1920s and ’30s. Eventually, he played guest appearances with Count Basie and Fats Waller, and played Carnegie Hall at the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert in 1938.

In the 1940s, Broonzy met writer and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel and became a performer in Terkel’s traveling music production, “I Come for to Sing.” The show played in Ames in the late 1940s, and Broonzy met and became friends with Leonard and Lillian Feinberg, members of the English faculty at Iowa State College.

According to a 1952 interview with the Ames Daily Tribune, it was at about that time Broonzy found himself “just plain tired” of touring, and be said he liked Ames better than any place he had seen.

The Feinbergs helped him find a job as a janitor at Friley Hall, and during that time, he lived in one of the Quonset huts at Pammel Court. Broonzy wrote “The Moppin’ Blues” in honor of his employment in Ames.

Broonzy did not stay long. Recording and touring offers still came to him, and in the end he could not refuse them, leaving to tour Europe in 1951. Though he stopped to visit Ames and interview with the Tribune in 1952, by then he was earning steady money as a musician, performing on stage with Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Leadbelly.

Broonzy died in 1958 from throat cancer. He is buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Ill.