In late 1938, producer John Hammond needed a raw Delta bluesman to replace the recently deceased Robert Johnson at his From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. He called Big Bill Broonzy, expecting a rustic country performer. What he got was a sophisticated urban pioneer already laying the groundwork for electric Chicago blues. This episode unpacks the life of a musical chameleon whose birth year and birthplace remain disputed, who claimed wartime service he almost certainly never saw, and who adapted his sound to whatever each audience demanded.

We follow Broonzy from a cigar box fiddle and segregated two-way picnics in Arkansas through the Great Migration to Chicago in 1920, where he learned guitar from Papa Charlie Jackson, worked as a Pullman porter and foundry laborer, and forged his percussive style at rent parties. The episode covers his flop debut for Paramount, his prolific Bluebird years under Lester Melrose, his uncredited work as a ghostwriter and sideman, his electric experiments in the 1940s, and his reinvention as an acoustic folk icon for European and American revival audiences.

• How biographer Bob Riesman’s research on draft cards and census records undercut Broonzy’s claims of an 1893 birth and First World War service
• The $50 offer that ended his stint as a preacher when his wife spent the money before he could decide
• Why he recorded over 200 songs between 1927 and 1942 while also working in the shadows for Jazz Gillum, Tampa Red, and his half brother Washboard Sam
• His years as a janitor at Iowa State University, his co-founding of the Old Town School of Folk Music in 1957, and the song Black, Brown and White
• The cancer surgeries that removed a lung and severed his vocal cords, the 1958 benefit concert in Chicago, and his influence on Lennon, McCartney, Clapton, and Ronnie Wood