introduction to The blues dream of billy boy arnold

Publshed by the University of Chicago Press

Commentators often glibly divide the human race between the dreamers and the doers, but history may actually belong to those who embody both dispositions. William “Billy Boy” Arnold is a self-confessed romantic, but he was born a man of action.

By the time he was five, he had found his life’s passion—the blues.

At twelve, he knew that music would be his vocation.

Six years later, he was a recording star.

Single-minded self-propulsion has been the story of Billy Boy’s life, and so it is the theme of this memoir. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is a revelatory account of a remarkable and unique journey—by someone who was both a keen observer and an important participant—through no fewer than five landmark events in the history of American music: the creation of the Chicago blues style, the birth of rock and roll, the arrival of white musicians on the Chicago blues scene, the appropriation of the Chicago blues sound by white rock groups in the 1960s, and the transition of black blues to a predominantly white audience.

Billy Boy Arnold is the only musician alive today who has lived the entire history of the Chicago blues scene. Its zenith was the mid-1950s, when the new, raw, amplified approach of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf reigned supreme, but the city had established itself as a major blues center two decades prior to that, thanks to the extensive and impressive output—much of it captured by producer Lester Melrose and released on RCA Victor’s Bluebird label—of Windy City legends like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Big Maceo Merriweather, and Jazz Gillum. Thrilled by these recordings as a schoolboy, the young Billy Boy made a commitment to seek out what he calls “the blues world.”

Had he not become a musician, Billy Boy might have made an excellent police detective. Henry Morton Stanley’s legendary search for David Livingstone has nothing on the twelve-year-old Arnold’s dogged pursuit of his idol, blues legend John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, across the South Side of Chicago. Billy Boy’s method was to accost anyone carrying a guitar and ask that person two questions: Do you know Sonny Boy Williamson? How do you get to make records? Those weren’t idle questions. They were focused queries that demonstrated the interrogator’s desire to make contact with the blues world and his determination to find a place for himself in it.

Billy Boy’s youthful single-mindedness earned him two momentous meetings with his hero, but the promise of a deeper, mentoring relationship was abruptly shattered when Williamson was murdered two weeks after their second meeting. Although the profound shock of Sonny Boy’s premature death still reverberates for Billy Boy, at the time it made him determined to expand his blues circle by seeking out popular artists like Blind John Davis, Big Bill Broonzy, and Memphis Minnie. More importantly, Billy Boy launched his own career by singing and playing on the streets. The ambitious teenager had already spent five years in the blues world when Muddy Waters assumed the throne as the Windy City’s blues king in the early 1950s, and before he reached voting age Billy Boy had joined the slim ranks of Chicago blues artists who had a bona fide hit record on their résumé.

In 1955, six months after Elvis Presley’s recording debut blew open the door to rhythm and blues for white teenagers, Billy Boy contributed to two of the earliest and biggest rock and roll hits (“I’m a Man” and “Bo Diddley”), both produced by the legendary Leonard Chess.

In the early 1960s, when young white musicians like Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite began jamming in the black blues clubs, Billy Boy was one of the first established Chicago blues stars to work with them and accept them as equals.

By the middle of the decade, when blues-based British bands like the Yardbirds and the Animals made their assault on the American pop charts, they came armed with cover versions of American blues records, including Billy Boy’s Vee-Jay sides.

By the 1970s, Billy Boy and the other black blues artists were navigating a profound cultural shift as the blues audience became mostly white, a simultaneously challenging and liberating sea change that rejuvenated the careers of those who were able to make the transition.

I first became a fan of Billy Boy’s music in the 1970s, when I bought the LP Blow the Back Off It, a collection of his recordings for Chess and Vee-Jay on the British Red Lightnin’ label. When Billy Boy resurfaced in the 1990s with two comeback CDs on Alligator Records, I was impressed all over again with the vitality of his sound.

The first time I saw Billy Boy perform on stage was in 2015, when he came to Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley in Seattle as part of the Harmonica Blowout series hosted by Mark Hummel. This was an ideal showcase for Billy Boy, since the program was designed as a tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson, and Billy Boy gave compelling and faithful performances of several of his hero’s tunes.

Mark made an evening full of great music even more memorable by inviting me to join him, Billy Boy, Steve Guyger, Rick Estrin, Rich Yescalis, and an all-star backing band on stage for the finale. Afterward, I made my way upstairs to the dressing room to thank Mark, but when I popped my head in the door, the only person in the room was Billy Boy. He looked up and complimented me on my harmonica playing. I planted myself in a seat across from him, and it wasn’t long before he was telling me about the meetings between his twelve-year-old self and Sonny Boy. I left our brief encounter very much taken by Billy Boy’s friendly but dignified personal manner, his passion for the music, and his detailed recall of events that had occurred sixty years before.

All of that rattled around in the back of my head for the next couple of years as I learned more about Billy Boy’s significant and enduring career. I kept coming back to his remarkable personal story and how it needed to be documented—in his own voice. I talked with several friends who knew Billy Boy, and they all praised his talent, his warmth, his integrity, his uncanny memory, and his willingness to share his story.

In 2018 Mark Hummel brought Billy Boy to the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon, for another Harmonica Blowout. I called Mark about a week before the show, told him that I had been thinking about approaching Billy Boy about a memoir, and asked if he would reintroduce me to Billy Boy at the Portland show. A few days later Mark did just that during intermission at the Alberta Rose. I told Billy Boy about my background as a musician and a writer, did my best to explain why I thought his memoir would be not only a great read but a historically important and culturally valuable document, and asked him whether he would be willing to let me pay him a visit in Chicago to explain more about how I might help him with such a project. Billy Boy was amenable.

A couple of months later, I enlisted the help of Dick Shurman, the Grammy Award–winning blues producer and a close friend of Billy Boy’s, in arranging a lunch with the three of us in Chicago at the Valois diner in Hyde Park, a favorite eatery of both Billy Boy’s and Barack Obama’s. I had barely launched into my sales pitch when Billy Boy interrupted me and got right down to business: “If Dick says you’re all right, that’s good enough for me. When do we get started? Do you have a tape recorder with you?”

Over the next year and a half, I taped more than sixty hours of interviews with Billy Boy, transcribed them, and, with minimal editing, created a narrative from those transcriptions. I want to make it crystal clear that I am Billy Boy’s partner in this effort, not his ghostwriter. My goal was to faithfully capture Billy Boy’s story in his own voice, and Billy Boy insisted that every word in the published version of his story be his, true and free of embellishment.

I think that Billy Boy and I both succeeded. The interviews naturally encompassed Billy Boy’s career and the blues legends he knew and worked with. (And what a list that is: Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Blind John Davis, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Junior Wells, Rice Miller, Otis Spann, Jimmy Rogers, Earl Hooker, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton, among many others.) Billy Boy also reflected on his childhood, the early days of the Chicago blues scene, the history of the black neighborhoods in Chicago, what it was like to spend a night in a South Side blues club in 1955, the workings of the music business, his brush with Jim Crow while touring the South, the experience of performing in foreign countries, his lifelong effort to improve himself, his struggles to collect the royalties to which he was entitled, and the future of the blues. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold has a chronological structure, not just because that is a traditional and logical approach, but because it’s the best way to convey the swiftness of Billy Boy’s early rise and the cumulative impact of the cultural shifts that influenced him and the blues.

Billy Boy Arnold is a vigorous eighty-four-year-old who is in his eighth decade as a performing musician. He remains a committed disciple of Sonny Boy Williamson and the deep blues, but his best-known recordings show the influence of the rock and roll that he also loves and helped create. Billy Boy’s musical influence has been extensive and international—his recordings and songs have been covered by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, David Bowie, the Blues Brothers, Canned Heat, Hot Tuna, John Hammond, Tom Jones, Aerosmith, Gary Moore, and the Red Devils. Billy Boy may be self-effacing by nature, but he also has a solid sense of what he has accomplished in life.

Billy Boy’s memory is nothing short of phenomenal. He possesses an encyclopedic recall of the details behind countless blues recordings—the labels that issued them, the studios where the sessions took place, the years they were released, which tunes were on the B side, the backing musicians involved, and so on. You can show him an old photograph and he will inform you that it was taken on Mother’s Day in 1957. Navigating the urban grid is the first thing that city boys like Billy Boy learn to do, and his recollections almost always snap to a precise location. His ability to instantly recall the specific addresses and street corners in Chicago where his contemporaries lived and where the long-gone music clubs, record stores, and theaters were located makes his remembrances all the more fascinating and unassailable. Billy Boy’s geographic recollections were the inspiration for the maps of the South and West Sides of Chicago that appear in this book.

When he wasn’t recording or performing himself, Billy Boy was on the scene as a devoted fan of the music, so his story is much more expansive than a recounting of his own exploits. Billy Boy is an intelligent and thoughtful man with a wry sense of humor (there is a lot of laughter on those interview tapes that was unfortunately lost in translation), but he could not be more serious about the importance of black music in America and its history. Bill Greensmith and Mike Vernon are two of the earliest British blues researchers (they began documenting the genre in the 1960s), and Bill told me recently that back in the day he and Mike considered Billy Boy to be one of the first serious blues historians.

The most majestic music about the human condition ever created deserves an honest and eloquent spokesperson from within the ranks of its creators. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is that inside story.