It is over half a century since the first publication of the autobiography Big Bill Blues (1955), but now in less than a year two new biographies of Big Bill Broonzy have been published. Bob Riesman's book follows Roger House's Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (2010). Why the sudden resurgence of interest in this musician? Perhaps it emanates from the spectacle of President Obama's inauguration, where the closing prayer by the Rev. Lowery seemed to draw on Broonzy's “Black, Brown and White Blues” to comment on the new hope for racial harmony. Alternatively, if considered alongside the release of Will Kaufman's Woody Guthrie: American Radical (2011), it could be representative of a renewed appreciation of one of America's most prominent folksingers. Whatever the reason, this is a most welcome and well-executed examination of the life of one of the most important and influential African American musicians of the twentieth century.

Broonzy was pivotal in the development of an urban blues sound in Chicago during the 1930s, which involved acting as a mentor for many emerging musicians that ventured northwards and would later gain iconic status in blues history, such as Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim. However, Broonzy was also central in disseminating the blues to white audiences. Riesman sheds light on the singer's work with the emerging “white” folk revival, particularly his involvement in Pete Seeger's “People's Songs,” and in his association with figures such as Win Stracke and Studs Terkel in Chicago. Broonzy's remarkable adaptability demonstrated itself at John Hammond's “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938 where he successfully fit the bill as the “primitive singer,” despite the fact he had been playing a range of more progressive styles throughout the 1930s. The “primitive” image came in particularly useful for his travels across the Atlantic. With the emerging R & B scene in the US, Broonzy “reinvented” himself as a country blues singer for small but highly knowledgeable transatlantic audiences. The singer cultivated an image of himself which was precisely what traditionalist jazz collectors of Europe had imagined. The author gathers reactions to Broonzy by British musicians such as Alexis Korner and Eric Clapton (not to mention Pete Townshend's Appreciation) to substantiate the enormous influence of the singer's transatlantic persona on the British musical landscape.

The strength of Riesman's biography is precisely this focus on Broonzy's ability to reinvent himself. While House focussed on the singer's role as spokesperson for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, Riesman's emphasis is on what the singer “chose” to say about his life. For instance, he highlights that contrary to what Broonzy stated, he probably did not serve in the armed forces during World War I, but rather adopted stories he had heard from returning veterans to tell a more “authentic” story of the African American experience. The author is therefore particularly sensitive to the constructed nature of history, diverging from the classical biographical style of establishing dates and events. The book is built on extensive archival research and interviews from Big Bill Blues, with prominent figures such as Studs Terkel and Alan Lomax, and correspondence with close friends such as Win Stracke. From these “documents” emerge not only the contradictions of Broonzy's various tales, but also his immense charm and capacity to forge lasting friendships on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as his natural ability to tell a gripping story.

Broonzy's role in the development of the blues as both music and an idea has for too long been submerged beneath stories about mythical Delta blues figures such as Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, where fact and fiction often intertwine. Riesman, however, uses the substantial recorded material available to narrate Broonzy's story. The singer is appreciated as an individual who played a range of music, had a profound influence on other musicians, and was a central figure in the appreciation of the purist image of traditional country blues abroad, which was to have an enormous influence on transatlantic conceptions of the blues during the revival of the 1960s. For this reason, the author can be forgiven for his uninspired analysis of lyrics that, while demonstrating Broonzy's abilities, sometimes seems to lack purpose and fails to support the narrative. Overall, the book is highly sensitive to the social and historical contexts in which Broonzy lived and which determined his life and musical experiences, such as the boom of Race Records in the 1920s, the Depression, the Great Migration, and the postwar era. In this way, the reader can appreciate that while music history may have often been told in segregated terms, Big Bill Broonzy was an extremely important figure on both sides of the colour line as well as both sides of the Atlantic.