A Guy Who Knew The Mister James Crow Score-Way Back In The Day-Bluesman Big Bill Broonzy   

By Fritz Taylor

I have heard the name Big Bill Broonzy, the old time bluesman, for a long time now since my old high school friend, Seth Garth, was the first to tune me into the genre about twenty-five years ago. Seth, who after a very trying young adulthood (as was mine) turned into a better than average free-lance film and music critic for many publications starting with Rolling Stone when that publication meant something to the counter-cultural world it was aimed at back in the day. As part of that career he was constantly looking for the roots of the blues-what he called “the blues is dues” project. Big Bill was a relatively later entry in his research and had only surfaced only because he had heard a cover of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night done by a bluesman’s voice he couldn’t place. That turned out to be Big Bill.         

Upon further research Seth found that Big Bill besides playing the usual blues standards of the day like Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home, Chicago also sung some political songs, a bit unusual for a bluesman although the subject wasn’t about politics in general but what to do about Mister James Crow and his feudal police state laws down South among his people. So recently when I was in Washington, D.C. and got chance to go to the newly opened African-American History Museum on the National Mall ironically near the Washington Monument I was not surprised to hear in the section on the second lower level which traces the struggle for black rights from the Civil War to the Civil Rights days, the period of the struggle against Mister Jim Crow straight up down south and indirectly up north the voice of one Big Bill Broonzy singing about what you going to do about Mister James Crow. And his classic Black, Brown, and White which is high-lighted from YouTube above.

Yeah, Big Bill knew the ropes of American society in his time, knew exactly what was going down. Thanks, brother.