DAVE & PHIL ALVIN

Common Ground: Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin Play and Sing the Songs of Big Bill Broonzy

Yep Roc Records

by Eric Steiner

I was pleasantly surprised that Dave and Phil Alvin have reinterpreted the legendary Big Bill Broonzy on their first album together in 30 years, Common Ground, released on one of America’s most diverse roots and Americana labels, Yep Roc. 

I’ve long been a fan of the pioneering work of “Big Bill” Broonzy. Like many of his fellow bluesmen and blueswomen in the early 20^th century, his youth has been inconsistently documented. There are conflicting accounts of his birth and childhood – some say he was born in Mississippi, others think he grew up in Arkansas. As a young man, Broonzy served in a segregated U.S. Army unit in World War I in Europe, and after the Great War, he relocated to Chicago as part of the first great migration of African Americans searching for work in what Illinois’ poet laureate Carl Sandburg called “the City of the Big Shoulders.”  He worked odd jobs in Chicagoland and recorded for the Grafton, Wisconsin-based Paramount Records, smaller “race record” imprints like Blue Bird, and eventually, Broonzy would be the top-selling artist on the popular Vocalion label.  From the 1920s until succumbing to cancer in 1958, Broonzy copyrighted 300 songs.  His life has been amply documented in books like the 2013 Keeping the Blues Alive Award-winning I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy by Bob Reisman from the University of Chicago Press, as well as his 1955 autobiography co-written with Belgian writer Yannick Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues.

Back to the Alvin Brothers. Two years ago, Phil had a serious health scare in Spain and had to be resuscitated; this likely contributed to not only this Dave & Phil reunion CD, but also a 2014 gig calendar that has included the Troubadour in Los Angeles, South by Southwest in Austin, and the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.  During their visit to Chicago’s folk music Mecca on West Armitage, Dave and Phil played “Big Bill’s” Martin guitar – an event which inspired this album.

Broonzy, along with Old Town School’s co-founder Win Stracke and fellow Chicago-area “I Come For to Sing” alumnus Studs Terkel, were early champions for the Old Town School’s first home on North Avenue home in the last years of his life.  Broonzy’s career spanned 30 years and many musical eras, ranging from hokum and minstrel shows to the electric Chicago blues sound, and from big band and protest songs back to traditional American folk songs on visits to Europe in the 1950s (predating Lippman and Rau’s “American Folk Blues” tours that introduced Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson #2, Sister Rosetta Thorpe, Willie Dixon and many other post-war blues artists to European audiences).

Three decades ago, Dave and Phil formed The Blasters, a Southern California-based roots and rockabilly band that reinvigorated Americana with high-energy songs like “Marie, Marie,” “Border Radio” and the title cut from their critically acclaimed 1981 release on Los Angeles’ Slash Records, American Music. In 1986, Dave left the band to pursue a solo career in punk (with X) and alt-country (with The Knitters), and in 2000, Dave received a Grammy for Public Domain: Songs From the Wild Land, a collection of traditional folk songs with members of his band, The Guilty Men, on the Hightone label. Phil continued to helm The Blasters after his brother’s departure.

If Common Ground doesn’t land on “Top 10” lists of roots-Americana or blues critics by New Year’s Eve this year, I’ll be very surprised.  There’s an easy, “old-timey” feel to an acoustic version of “Key to the Highway” and an amped-up, full band electric treatment of “Just a Dream,” which presciently imagines “Big Bill” sitting in President Obama’s chair in the West Wing. “Highway” is punctuated nicely by Phil’s harmonica, and together, Dave and Phil’s vocals and guitar playing serve this song nicely.

As I listened to Dave and Phil’s CD, I revisited Broonzy’s early recordings of varying quality and provenance online. After comparing this CD with the originals, I think the Alvin Brothers have not only honored “Big Bill’s” memory, but they also have put their own unique twist on many of the songs and made them their own. The frenetic “How You Want It Done?” is a finely-wrought race to the finish line in under four minutes and “Tomorrow” is an unplugged acoustic gem that’s a stark contrast to Broonzy’s original version that featured big band, swing-style horns and keyboards.

The set ends with an acoustic instrumental, “Saturday Night Rub,” that reminds me of my favorite Grateful Dead songs, “Friend of the Devil” and “Uncle John’s Band.” “Saturday Night Rub” was one of Broonzy’s signature tunes from the 1920s and I’m pleased that Dave and Phil have included it on this heartfelt tribute. Thanks to technology, I was fortunate to virtually join Dave and Phil playing “Big Bill’s” guitar at the Old Town School on Armitage (thanks to a Chicago Tribune YouTube video), and see Broonzy play three songs filmed in 1957 by Pete Seeger when “Big Bill” worked as a camp cook at the Circle Pines summer camp in Hastings, Michigan.

Common Ground is an exceptional introduction to one of America’s 20^th century musical pioneers, and I heartily recommend that Chicago Blues Guide.com readers explore “Big Bill” Broonzy’s music through Bob Reisman’s book and the artist’s own autobiography, learn about how he replaced Robert Johnson at John Hammond, Sr.’s From Spirituals to Swing Concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938, and listen to three friends talk with Studs Terkel on the Smithsonian Folkways LP from 1959, Blues with Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee Presented by WFMT-FM. The station was home to “The Voice of the Terkel” for 45 years. I had the good fortune of meeting Studs a number of times while I worked at the Chicago International Film Festival: he was always impishly curious with a special gleam in his eye as he talked about Chicago’s folk music scene and artists like Fred and Ed Holstein, Earl Pionke and the Earl of Old Town, John Prine, Jim Post, Steve Goodman and Bonnie Koloc.  I’d like to think that Studs would have welcomed Dave and Phil Alvin, and Common Ground, to the airwaves, as they honored one of his dear friends.

Eric Steiner is the Editor of the Washington Blues Society Bluesletter and the immediate past president of the Washington Blues Society.  He served on the Blues Foundation Board of Directors from 2010 to 2013. A former Chicagoan, he is a frequent contributor to the Chicago Blues Guide. 

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