Acoustic Blues Guitar a la Big Bill Broonzy

Big Bill Broonzy's career began in the nineteen twenties when he performed country blues to mostly black audiences. Through the ‘30s and ‘40s he successfully navigated an effective evolution in technique to a much more metropolitan blues guitar picking sound experience popular with white listeners.

In the fifties a return to his old-fashioned folk-blues origins made him undoubtedly the very best figures of the up-and-coming American folk blues music revival and a truly international artist.

His very long and diverse experience marks him as one of the key figures in the formation of blues guitar entertainment in the twentieth century any acoustic blues guitar lessons should certainly always incorporate songs from Big Bill.



Broonzy copyrighted in excess of 300 songs throughout his whole life, including both adaptations of traditional folk songs and unique blues songs. As a blues writer, he was exceptional in that his creations mirrored the numerous points of view of his rural-to-metropolitan experiences.

Born William Lee Conley Broonzy, Big Bill Broonzy was one of Mittie Belcher & Frank Broonzy's 17 offspring. His birth site and time are disputed.

The Mississippi Blues Commission states that whereas he claimed delivery in Bolivar County, Mississippi, Broonzy was in fact born in Lake Dick, Arkansas state.

Big bill claimed he was born in eighteen ninety three and many experts state that year, but after his death his twin sister released a certificate of birth giving it as 1898, the actually accepted date.



In a short time after his delivery the family unit moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Broonzy spent his younger years. He got under way playing music at an early age.

At the age of 10 (ten) he made himself a fiddle by using an empty cigar box and figured out how to perform gospel songs and traditional music from his uncle, Jerry Belcher. He and a friend called Louis Carter, who played a do-it-yourself guitar, started off performing at communal and church functions.

Big Bill's own influences could be found in the folk music, gospel songs, field hollers, ragtime music, tin pan alley and country blues he listened to when he was young, and the styles of his contemporaries, such as Blind Blake, Jimmy Rogers, Blind Lemon Jefferson & Son House. Big bill incorporated all these influences into his personal form of the blues that suggested the post-war Chicago blues sound, later perfected and made popular by performers that include Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.

While he had been a pioneer of the Chicago blues style and had also used electric equipment as soon as nineteen forty two, his newish, white followers wanted to experience him performing his earliest songs complemented just by his own acoustic guitar, since this was viewed as to be more "authentic".

A sizable percentage of his first ARC/CBS recordings were released again in bigger compilations by CBS-Sony, and additional earlier songs have been collected on blues reissue labels, as have his later European and Chicago records of the 1950s.

In nineteen eighty, he was inducted into the first class of the Blues Hall of Fame alongside with 20 more of the world's greatest blues superstars. In 2007, he was awarded top class of the Gennett Records Walk of Fame along with 11 more musical masters such as Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.