Remembering a Pioneer of Folk Music and Blues

/Home/Blues Artists/Bluesmen/Legendary Blues Men

Remembering a Pioneer of Folk Music and Blues
June 17, 2011
By NEIL TESSER
The New York Times

With the right tour guide, you can practically see the building that stood at East 47th Street and Martin Luther King Drive, and almost hear the music that escaped its windows in the 1950s.
Enlarge This Image
Andrew A. Nelles for Chicago News Cooperative

Bob Riesman, at the Old Town School of Folk Music, holds a guitar that belonged to the blues musician Big Bill Broonzy.
Chicago News Cooperative

A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of Chicago and the surrounding area for The New York Times.

More From the Chicago News Cooperative »

The right tour guide is Bob Riesman, who knows that the fabled blues musician Big Bill Broonzy called that building home for the last decade of his life, until his death in 1958.

Mr. Riesman’s illuminating new biography, “I Feel So Good,” reveals Broonzy as “the first ambassador of the blues,” an assessment based on Broonzy’s European tours in the 1950s, as well as his prominence in Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s, when he paved the way for protégés like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and, later, the British rockers Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.

The book also describes Broonzy’s surprising role in making Chicago a folk music hub in the ’50s and ’60s, thanks to Broonzy’s versatility and catholicity — qualities that allowed him to move easily among supposedly separate genres like blues, jazz, folk and even country.

Looking now at the weed-strewn lot that once bore the address 4706 South Parkway, before the street was renamed for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Riesman agreed that its unkempt condition, and the lack of a historical marker, suggested the decline of a neighborhood and the loss of a legacy.

“Yet across the street is a handsome, relatively new space that is used as a concert hall,” he said, pointing to the Harold Washington Cultural Center, a few doors from where the impressive Regal Theater thrived in the 1930s. Mr. Riesman raised the prospect of Broonzy’s “sitting in that apartment and surveying the scene today,” and guessed that he might also see possibilities for renewal.

“Bill recognized there was evil in the world, and he spoke out against racial injustice and prejudice,” Mr. Riesman said. “Yet I don’t see any evidence that he gave in to despair or himself despaired of the prospects for the larger African-American community he took such pride in being part of.”

Mr. Riesman spent most of the last 10 years writing “I Feel So Good.” He unearthed century-old birth and marriage records, listened to Broonzy’s many recorded interviews and pored over his autobiography, “Big Bill Blues,” discovering and putting into context Broonzy’s many historical exaggerations.

“I Feel So Good” is the inspiration for Friday night’s tribute to Broonzy at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 North Lincoln Avenue, starring Billy Boy Arnold With the Sanctified Grumblers, which will conclude with Mr. Riesman signing books in the lobby.

The concert speaks to a time when folk singers and blues artists mingled more freely, a time when various stylistic streams blended in Chicago before they diverged again in subsequent decades. The proof lies in the way Broonzy helped sow the seeds for the Old Town School of Folk Music, now an institution in the city.

Broonzy was already famous — partly through his participation in “From Spirituals to Swing,” a groundbreaking 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall that traced the evolution of African-American music — when he joined Win Stracke, a folk singer and television performer, and Studs Terkel, who was the narrator, in the seminal folk music revue “I Come for to Sing.” The success of their first concert, at the University of Chicago in 1947, eventually led to a long-running weekly series in the Loop.

“What’s noteworthy is that they established this residency at the Blue Note, the most prestigious jazz club in Chicago,” Mr. Riesman said. “This demonstrated, to a new generation of nightclub entrepreneurs, that folk music could be a commercially attractive proposition; they observed that the audience were business executives spending their time and money to hear this music.”

As Mr. Riesman sees it, you can draw a straight line from those nights at the Blue Note, through the Gate of Horn — Chicago’s first folk club — to today’s Old Town School.

“The Gate of Horn opened in 1956,” Mr. Riesman recalled. “That’s where Win Stracke heard a fellow named Frank Hamilton, who he started studying guitar with. When he saw that Frank was a terrific teacher, Win acted on an idea he’d had for some time, which was to have a folk music school, where people would go to concerts and take classes.”

On Dec. 1, 1957, when Stracke opened the Old Town School at North and Sedgwick Avenues, his friend Big Bill Broonzy had undergone lung-cancer surgery and could no longer sing. But he could still play, in the relaxed but dynamic fingerstyle technique he had perfected over the years.

“Even without singing, Bill was enough of a charismatic presence to be the featured performer,” Mr. Riesman said. “He played a blues song while Frank Hamilton diagrammed it for the audience. And that cinched the deal for people to say, ‘I want to learn to play guitar like this,’ and the Old Town School was off and running.”

The folk clubs that soon proliferated in Chicago were “a direct result of forces Big Bill set in motion,” Mr. Riesman said. “The fact that he played such a significant role in Chicago’s emergence as a folk music center reflects the way that musical boundaries just evaporated for him.”