From Los Angeles to Chicago
William Earl Branch was born in Chicago on October 3, 1951, and grew up in Los Angeles. He began playing harmonica at ten, working out melodies for himself. His early listening ranged across Motown, folk music, and rock, including the Rolling Stones and the Doors. The instrument was already a constant companion when he returned to Illinois in 1969 to attend university, but the blues had not yet become the center of his musical life.
That changed at a Grant Park festival organized by Willie Dixon in August 1969. Branch heard an extraordinary gathering of blues performers and began seeking out the music in Chicago clubs. His university education and his informal education on the South Side developed together. He completed a political science degree, while performances at Theresa’s Lounge and the Checkerboard introduced him to musicians whose records would become his working vocabulary.
Learning beside the older players
Branch entered a musical community in which an aspiring harmonica player could hear, meet, and sometimes work beside Big Walter Horton, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Carey Bell. He learned through listening and participation, absorbing differences in phrasing and stagecraft as well as harmonica technique. The experience gave him several models for a career rather than a single style to imitate.
An encounter with Little Mack Simmons at the Green Bunny Club in 1975 helped establish his reputation. Alligator founder Bruce Iglauer was in the audience for their harmonica contest. That year Branch also made an early recording appearance for Barrelhouse. Dixon subsequently hired him for the Chicago Blues All-Stars, where he followed Carey Bell in the harmonica chair. Touring with Dixon taught him how to sustain a performance and how to work within a professional ensemble. The association also placed a younger player inside the music’s international touring network.
Building the Sons of Blues
In 1977 Branch assembled a group of younger Chicago musicians for the Berlin Jazz Festival. Guitarist Lurrie Bell and bassist Freddie Dixon were among the original players. The Sons of Blues name connected this generation to its predecessors, quite literally in the cases of Bell and Dixon, without requiring every member to be the child of a famous musician. Branch’s own musical inheritance came through the clubs and his years of working with older performers.
The group reached record buyers through Alligator’s Living Chicago Blues series in 1978. Chicago’s Young Blues Generation and Where’s My Money? followed in the next decade. As personnel changed, the Sons of Blues remained Branch’s principal band, accommodating players with distinct personalities rather than freezing its earliest lineup. Carlos Johnson became an important guitar partner. Their later shared releases included Billy Branch & the Sons of Blues Featuring Carlos Johnson and Don’t Mess with the Bluesmen.
Branch also recorded beyond his own group. Harp Attack! brought him together with James Cotton, Junior Wells, and Carey Bell, making the relationship between generations audible in one setting. Superharps paired him with Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite, and Sugar Ray Norcia. These projects gave harmonica players room to show individual voices inside a common blues language.
Albums with room for change
Blues Shock, released by Blind Pig in 2014, mixed original material with songs that connected blues to soul and popular rhythm and blues. Its program included the band statement “Sons of Blues,” the title instrumental, “Function at the Junction,” and “Song for My Mother.” The contrast between dance numbers and a personal closing instrumental reflected the breadth of Branch’s approach. He could organize a whole album around the band’s character rather than simply a sequence of harmonica features.
For 2019’s Roots and Branches: The Songs of Little Walter, he returned to Alligator with a different kind of project. Branch, Rosa Branch, and pianist Sumito “Ariyo” Ariyoshi co-produced a program of fifteen pieces written by or associated with Little Walter. Guitarist Giles Corey, bassist Marvin Little, and drummer Andrew “Blaze” Thomas joined Branch and Ariyoshi. The arrangements incorporated soul, funk, and gospel touches. A closing contribution from Walter’s daughter Marion Diaz added family recollections to the musical tribute.
The Blues Is My Biography arrived in 2025 as the first release on Rosa’s Lounge Records. Its eleven tracks included “Dead End Street” and “Toxic Love.” The connection to a working Chicago club suited a band whose identity had always depended on regular contact with audiences. Across these records, Branch balanced singing, songwriting, and harmonica rather than treating the instrument as an isolated novelty.
Teaching the music and its history
Education became a parallel career. Branch’s Blues in Schools work combines history, songwriting, instrumental instruction, and performance. Students learn existing songs, write their own, and perform with the Sons of Blues. Longer residencies can introduce drums, guitar, bass, and piano as well as harmonica. The aim is practical participation: students experience how a band listens, rehearses, and builds a song together.
His projects have extended well beyond Chicago. A Ford Foundation-supported residency in Xalapa, Mexico, explored connections between African American and Afro-Mexican cultural histories. In Indianola, Mississippi, he taught harmonica to students for the opening of the B.B. King Museum. More recently, workshops with the Pinetop Perkins Foundation have brought young musicians into contact with experienced blues performers. Alumni include trumpeter Owuor Arunga, whose later career reached audiences far outside the blues circuit.
Branch’s influence therefore travels through several channels: recordings, touring bands, and students who carry the experience into other musical settings. His own harmonica style similarly combines inheritance and personal choice. He retains the rhythmic attack and expressive bends of Chicago blues while using melodic upper-register playing and the soul and funk sounds he grew up hearing. His work as an educator gives that musical openness a practical form.
Branch’s students have also appeared before large festival audiences. In 1996 he led a Blues in Schools group on the main stage of the Chicago Blues Festival in a performance broadcast by NPR. The occasion gave young musicians a public role in the same festival culture that had first inspired him. His own appearances in Adventures in Babysitting and Next of Kin, and on national television, offered other routes to an audience. Classroom performance, film, and touring all became ways of introducing listeners to a music he had first encountered as a university student.