The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy

Kevin D. Greene is the Nina Bells Suggs Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi.
For more information about Kevin D. Greene, visit the Author Page.

“Greene challenges the typical construction of Broonzy, and the genre, by illustrating how the parameters of race, class, and geography influenced both the sound and interpretation of the tradition. . . . Greene’s multidisciplinary approach goes beyond biography and history.”--Arkansas Historical Quarterly

“The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy dissects our motivations for remembering or forgetting individual musicians and ethically documents social and cultural networks that can aid our ability to understand human creativity in relation to the passing of time.”--Journal of Southern History

“Broonzy’s guise – or guises, as Kevin D. Greene may insist in his new book The Invention and Reinvention of Big [Bill] Broonzy – may be worth taking the time to examine for what audiences wanted to hear from him and how they wanted to perceive him. . . . While not expressly a biography . . . or the blues-truth from Broonzy himself, Greene’s The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy will provide many reasons for Broonzy’s faces and places.”--ARSC Journal

"A wonderfully engaging and intellectually creative rendering of African American life, the city, and even U.S. foreign affairs through the life and music of Big Bill Broonzy."--Davarian L. Baldwin, author of Chicago's New Negroes

"By emphasizing Broonzy's successive (and successful) eras of self-reinvention, Greene persuasively positions this blues musician as a prism for understanding shifts in racial, national, and global identity in the twentieth century."--Joel Dinerstein, author of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America