Big Bill Blues - William Broonzy's Story - As Told to Yannick Bruynoghe

Bruynoghe, Yannick; Dance, Stanley - Foreword

Verlag: Cassell & Company Ltd., London, 1955

Beschreibung

139 Pages Indexed. A solid copy of the 1955 1st UK edition which preceded the American edition. This as new hard back was stored properly and the dust jacket did it's job of protection. The jacket is complete but a little soiled with light wear to the edges, and a small piece missing from the top spine area. Just below the $3.00 price on the front flap is the word 'imported' stamped. The interior text pages are original. Big Bill Broonzy does not need any introduction to the jazz world. But his story is as much for the uninitiated as for the devotee of the blues. For Big Bill is one of the last of the old Mississippi Negroes who has spent his life singing and composing blues. Hired out to work at seven years old, in the horse and buggy days of the beginning of the century, he played for the white folks around Arkansas on a fiddle made from a cigar box. He has since sung his way around the world. By the middle twenties he began to attract the record companies, and now he has cut 260 songs including the great Joe Turner Blues and a version of James P. Johnson's Backwater Blues more moving even than that of Bessie Smith. A bottle of whisky and a tape recorder brings Big Bill's story to these pages, just as he told it, letting the reminiscences of a lifetime spill into the air as they came to mind. Memories of his boyhood in the cotton fields, memories of the girls who inspired, by their faithlessness as much as their constancy, the blues which he wrote in the depths of depression or the heights of exultation. How did those haunting blues originate? What lay behind those stories told to the strumming of a guitar? Many of Big Bill's songs are given here with the incidents which inspired them. And he talks of the blues singers he has known and tells their stories too. His book is a unique piece of jazz literature. In his final words he writes his own epitaph. just write, he says, he was a happy man when he was drunk and playing with women; he was liked by all the blues singers; some would get a little jealous sometimes but Bill would buy a bottle of whisky and they would all start laughing and playing again. Big Bill - he loves his whisky, he's just a whisky-head man.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 21108

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Big Bill Blues - William Broonzy's Story - As Told to Yannick Bruynoghe
• Verlag: Cassell & Company Ltd., London
• Erscheinungsjahr: 1955
• Einband: Hard Back
• Illustrator: Oliver, Paul - With 9 Pages of Half-tone Illustrations and Four Drawings
• Auflage: First UK Edition
• Zustand: Very Good
• Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Good