Big Bill Broonzy – Amsterdam Live Concerts 1953

“If you like a song sing it,” Big Bill says, introducing one of many traditional tunes. “If you don’t, don’t sing it.” No more concise description of Broonzy’s sound and vision is possible. He sang what he liked, and what he liked was as vast as any bluesman of his generation: proto-jazz, proto-rock ‘n’ roll, spirituals, parlor folk, country rags and tin pan alley pop. To say he tailored his material and style to the folk-frenzied audience of the early ’50s is only to state the obvious. He was a performer; he knew what his audience wanted. He knew even better how to stretch their own desires.

On these exceptionally clean recordings, his voice is devastating, melisma concentrated to a laser precision, range like a heaving delta, phrasing restive and inventive. He deprecates his guitar playing but he was more than capable, strumming hard to punctuate lines or to reel off a bright, out-of-nowhere figure.

His many stories cover discrimination, musicology, family relations and floods. He’s quickly, genuinely funny — can any of today’s blues performers say the same? — and he viewed “folk music” ironically but warmly. “They call ‘John Henry’ a folk song,” he says. “Down in Mississippi we call it a work song.” His work was to take even familiar songs such as “Trouble In Mind”, “Kansas City Blues”, “The Midnight Special” and “Crawdad Hole” and make them even more familiar — as in proverbial, as in the deepest sense.