The folk artist

Big Bill Broonzy is caught on camera in Italy during the mid 1950’s performing jazz pianist Richard M. Jones’ eight-bar blues classic “Trouble In Mind.”

Big Bill’s own influences included, spirituals, work songs, ragtime, and country blues he heard growing up, and by the styles of his contemporaries. All of these combined creating his style of the blues which foreshadowed the post-war Chicago sound, later refined and popularized by artists such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.

He had been a pioneer of the Chicago blues style and had employed electric instruments as early as 1942. Yet his new white audiences preferred the authenticity in the singing of his earliest works accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar.

In 1955 Broonzy published his autobiography Big Bill Blues in spite of his limited education with the assistance of Belgian writer Yannick Bruynoghe. He toured worldwide traveling to Africa, South America, the Pacific region, and across Europe into early 1956.

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