Broonzy, Big Bill

Broonzy was born in Scott, Mississippi, on June 26 of either 1893 (as he claimed throughout his lifetime) or 1898 (the year listed on his twin sister’s birth certificate). His parents, to whom twenty-one children were born, moved the family early in the first decade of the 1900s to Arkansas, where his father worked primarily as a sharecropping farmer. Broonzy’s first musical instrument was a homemade one-string fiddle, which he played at about age ten for what he...