Best of the Blues

No one else could have cried the song with the same blue, bittersweet sadness. No one else could have filled the familiar words with the same heart-heavy longing for rest and ease. So they turned on a phonograph and let Big Bill Broonzy sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at his own funeral.

"Young people have forgotten how to cry the blues," said Big Bill Broonzy as he lay dying in a dark room above the littered streets of Chicago's Negro South Side. "Back in my day, the people didn't know nothing else to do but cry. They couldn't say about things that hurt 'em. But now they talks and gets lawyers and things. They don't cry no more."

For William Lee Conley Broonzy, the business of crying the blues began when he and his twin sister Lannie were still barefoot kids scuffling in the played-out dirt around their parents' shack near Jackson, Miss. Bill pestered the owner of the general store into giving him a guitar. "Bill could play your name on it," says Lannie. "I swear he could make it talk."

When Bill and Lannie were twelve, their parents, both born in slavery, moved the family to Arkansas. Bill did his farm chores under duress. All he really wanted to do was make music, and when he was 18, he headed for Chicago. He got a job on the Illinois Central Railroad, but he lived for evenings and weekends when he could hang out at the Moonglow or the 308 Club or one of the other wonderful, schizofrantic jazz joints that flourished in the Chicago of the '20s. Soon Big Bill was playing far and wide with the best of them--Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Fats Waller. And always there was time to write his own songs: Partnership Woman, House Rent Stomp, Outskirts of Town.

Big Bill's blues were the simple, freewheeling poetry of fresh-plowed earth and cotton fields and the taste of mountain whisky under a hot summer sun. His blues were the big city too, its tenements, its bread lines, and its cheap women sneaking out of a man's bed at midnight to steal his day's pay. When highbrow critics filed his blues under "folk music," Bill snorted: "Folk songs? I don't know what they is. I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing "em."

Bill never saved the money he earned, and when a new generation cramped his country style, he was broke all the time. In 1950 he became a janitor at Iowa State College for $1.10 an hour. He made a comeback on the European jazz circuit, but last year he came home with a pain in his chest. In an operation to remove a lung cancer, Big Bill's vocal cords were damaged, and the full, gentle voice was reduced to a whisper. Last May he went under the knife once more, for a brain tumor, and he never sang again.

Last week, just after he turned 61, they buried Big Bill Broonzy in Chicago. His legacy was a battered suitcase, a few pictures, two guitars, and 200-odd recordings in which he preserved a part of his country--the best of the blues.

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