I Feel So Good

Big Bill Broonzy is one of the most prolific of all the blues performers, with a career that stretches from the late 1920s through to his death in the late 1950s. This book charts the story of Broonzy's life, drawing on documents, letters written by Broonzy and his family members, interviews with fellow musicians and his acquaintances and lovers.

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Big Bill Broonzy is one of the most prolific and well-known of all the blues performers, with a long career that stretches from the late 1920s through to his death in the late 1950s. Throughout his career, Broonzy transformed himself from recording light-hearted 'hokum' songs that appealed primarily to an inner-city African-American audience, to a pioneering figure in the growth of the Chicago blues scene from the mid-1930s through to the later 1940s, to a concert artist who toured Europe, wrote his own autobiography and became a major star performer in the last decade of his life. Although Broonzy wrote his own autobiography and told his life story at various times in many different interviews, the 'details' of his life have remained shrouded in myth - much of it created by Broonzy himself. There has been a steady stream of re-issues of his over 260 blues recordings in the past dozen years, but the liner notes and reviews have generally recycled the same 'facts' about his life that have circulated since his death in 1958. He has been cited in every blues anthology as a seminal figure in American music, but there has been no comprehensive look at his life and work.
Now, author Robert Reisman in "I Feel So Good" charts the entire story of Broonzy's life, drawing on newly discovered documents, letters written by Broonzy and his family members, interviews with fellow musicians and his acquaintances and lovers. The result is a true, full picture of a complex man and master musician, who was able to adapt to the many changes in American musical culture that occurred during his life. From the small Delta town of Scott, Mississippi, where Bill's parents worked as sharecroppers to the streets of Chicago and the symphony halls of Europe, the Bill Broonzy story is a uniquely American one that will appeal to all readers interested in the blues, African-American history and American popular culture.