A self-trained artist who didn’t start drawing until he was eighty-five and living on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1854 and spent his life after Emancipation working as a sharecropper. He moved to Montgomery at age eighty-one in 1935 and started drawing on scraps of cardboard in 1939, encouraged by a young artist named Charles Shannon who helped provide him with supplies. In the words of author Don Tate, Traylor’s life unfolds as a series of vivid events that Traylor would eventually transform into art. “Bill saved up memories of these times deep inside himself,” Tate writes in a repeated refrain. R. Gregory Christie’s naïve-style artwork is a perfect match for the subject of this outsider artist, and he introduces a second naive style to depict the pictures drawn by Traylor. Lyrical, literary, and wonderfully illustrated, this is a welcome introduction to an artist who, the afterword explains, is now considered one of the “most important self-taught American folk artists of the twentieth century.” (Ages 7–11)

Growing up as an enslaved boy on an Alabama cotton farm, Bill Traylor worked all day in the hot fields. When slavery ended, Bill's family stayed on the farm as sharecroppers. There Bill grew to manhood, raised his own family, and cared for the land and his animals.
By 1935 Bill was eighty--one and all alone on his farm. So he packed his bag and moved to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Lonely and poor, he wandered the busy downtown streets. But deep within himself Bill had a reservoir of memories of working and living on the land, and soon those memories blossomed into pictures. Bill began to draw people, places, and animals from his earlier life, as well as scenes of the city around him.
Today Bill Traylor is considered to be one of the most important self--taught American folk artists. Winner of Lee & Low's New Voices Award Honor, It Jes' Happened is a lively tribute to this man who has enriched the world with more than twelve hundred warm, energetic, and often humorous pictures.