“Those Songs Are Gonna Be Sung All Over This World!”: Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Tangled Routes of Folk Blues in Early Postwar Britain

This article focuses on the reception of “folk blues” in Britain in the immediate postwar period. Through an examination of the tours of blues guitarists Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy, I explore how British audiences understood the blues on the one hand as “rooted” in African American experience, yet on the other as capable of signifying broader affinities that transcended boundaries of race and nation. Early British blues criticism, informed by the circulation of US jazz and folklore scholarship, lauded male singer-guitarists found on “race” records for their insights into the African American musical past; at the same time, this music acquired political resonance when championed by left-wing causes on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as through its use in propaganda broadcasting and postwar cultural diplomacy efforts. Bringing these contexts to bear on the reception of White and Broonzy, I describe how each musician was required to navigate a complex terrain of ideals and expectations, with varying degrees of success.