Broonzy

I like the expansive non-definition proposed by the singer-songwriter and guitarist Big Bill Broonzy, as quoted by Bradley: “Some people call these ‘folk songs,’” he said onstage once.

Scott Barretta, a blues historian based in Greenwood, Miss., likened Rush’s success with white audiences to the second act Big Bill Broonzy had in the ’50s, after transitioning from urban to folk-blues and receiving support from white taste makers Studs Terkel and Alan Lomax.

Indeed, in one of those flashbacks the author throws the young Jasper together with the real-life blues legend Big Bill Broonzy, who lived in the Netherlands in the 1950s and here warns the youth that “the blues is a language you can’t lie in.”

Some criticized his prayer at Mr. Obama’s inauguration, which borrowed from the Big Bill Broonzy song “Black, Brown and White Blues.”

I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl.