I’m North Dakota-Minnesota Midwestern. I’m that color. I speak that way. I’m from someplace called the Iron Range. My brains and feelings have come from there. — Bob Dylan, Playboy, 1966 Born in St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, on […]
“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 […]
Critics have been rough on the folk-blues records of the ’50s and ’60s, albums that often repackaged country-turned-urban blues singers as facsimiles of some idealized rural past. The LPs that Big Bill Broonzy made for Folkways in the years leading […]
