Chicago’s blues scene still electrifying
City that gave birth to a genre a feast for fans
In the country whose Declaration of Independence claims liberty as an inalienable right, blues music and its offshoots have formed the soundtrack for rebels and freedom-seekers for more than a century.
It’s that bold history that my husband and I hoped to share with our music-freak progeny — our son, 17, and our daughter, 21 — on a family trip to Chicago. The kids, who adore classic rock, were most excited about attending Lollapalooza, the annual music festival staged in the city’s Grant Park. Of course, without rowdy Chicago-style blues, steeped in the Mississippi Delta’s dark, bitter juices, there’d be no Lollapalooza, we explained. As Willie Dixon, often called the father of modern Chicago blues, once put it, “The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits.”
The blues was born in the Delta at the tail end of the 1800s, an amalgam of secular and sacred forms of musical expression created by the descendants of African slaves who sang, chanted and shouted at work in the fields and at play. Millions of African-Americans fled the South’s racial segregation for northern opportunities starting in 1910 — the launch of the Great Migration. They brought their guitars, harmonicas and tortured personal histories to Chicago, where the blues established a foothold.
“The two main features of black life in the United States were segregation and migration: the former providing the impetus for the latter,” wrote Mike Rowe in his book Chicago Breakdown. “Musically, while segregation created the blues, migration spread the message.”
It did that persuasively, and out loud. Musicians accustomed to the quiet accompaniment of cicadas on Southern porches found urban Chicago so noisy that they amplified and increased the number of their instruments to make themselves heard, adding drums and sometimes piano and horns.
Lollapalooza 2012 drew 270,000 people for a massive lineup featuring such heavy metal rockers as Black Sabbath (originally a blues rock band), the “blues revivalists” known as Alabama Shakes, and Jack White, who’s been called “the Decade’s Dirty Bluesman.” Evidently, the blues is a feisty old bird with endless new tricks up her wing.
That bird looms large over the City of Big Shoulders. Visitors can build a trip to this boisterous city around Blues Fest, the largest free blues festival in the world, which takes place every June in Grant Park.
Locals and tourists alike also flock to Blues Alley, the location of the famous venues Kingston Mines and B.L.U.E.S. One of Chicago’s oldest surviving blues clubs, B.L.U.E.S. is a narrow, sexy, rough-and-tumble bar where your entire psyche may explode if you listen too long to rambunctious guitar “shredders” like local Pistol Pete.
Such clubs are generally adultsonly, but kids are welcome at Buddy Guy’s Legends at lunchtime on weekdays. Owner Guy is a 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee whose parents used to tell him, “Don’t try to be the best in town. Just try to be the best until the best come around.” No one better seems to have come around yet — Eric Clapton once referred to Guy as his “pilot.”
Legends’ walls are peppered with guitars and photographs of blues legends, including Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Koko Taylor. Inspecting these while a couple of young acoustic guitarists wailed Delta-style, our son — who was reading Guy’s autobiography, When I Left Home: My Story, on our trip — pronounced Legends the coolest “restaurant” ever. He returned the next day on his own, making his enthusiasm so clear to that afternoon’s solo artist that he was in- vited up to play along. He politely declined, recognizing his limitations; still, you can’t buy that kind of thrill.
If seeing Guy perform is your goal, and you’re over 21, January is your best bet. That’s when Legends stages 16 “Buddy shows,” where Guy — now in his 70s — takes the stage with a different individual or band every night.
Guy also hosts a free, downloadable podcast called the Chicago Blues Audio Tour that ought to be required listening for anybody hoping to understand Chicago blues. Even if you don’t drive around seeking the sites he mentions, he paints wonderful pictures. Sadly, many of the spots where the Windy City’s electrified blues once blasted are gone. The original Maxwell Street, once an obstreperous hub for partying black Chicagoans, got bulldozed years ago and now offers nothing spicier than the Mexican food at its Sunday flea market.
Luckily, you can still tour Chess Records, which Dixon’s widow purchased after his death and re-named Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. Occasionally you can even hear live music there. Leonard and Phil Chess, Jewish immigrants from Poland, started off running liquor stores in black neighbourhoods, featuring jukebox music and informal jams. After collaborating with another partner on the “race records” label Aristocrat, Leonard built his own studio, eventually named it Chess, and brought his brother on board. The Chess brothers also founded Checker Records.
Etta James recorded her immortal song At Last in the Chess studio, Chuck Berry blasted out Maybellene, and the Rolling Stones — huge blues and R&B fans — were so buzzed by the studio that they wrote and recorded a blues-rock instrumental named 2120 South Michigan Avenue, after its address. George Thorogood and the Destroyers did a cover of this tune on the band’s 2011 album, 2120 South Michigan Ave. The most important studio in blues history rocks on.
Meanwhile, the blues’ churchgoing cousin is alive and well in Chicago. The invention of modern gospel music is often credited to the city’s Thomas A. Dorsey, a 20th-century composer and music publisher and the son of a Baptist minister. His early years as a barrelhouse piano-man and jazz band leader inspired him to blend religious themes with the more worldly strains of blues and jazz in his own gospel compositions.
Dorsey helped Mahalia Jackson gain a wider audience. Though the line between the genres might have seemed thin to some, the Queen of Gospel once explained that she sang gospel because it gave her hope. “With the blues,” she noted, “when you finish, you still have the blues.”
Modern gospel music, often performed a cappella, its calland-response style echoing the “field holler” spirituals slaves once sang, has influenced musical genres from soul to hip-hop. House of Blues’ Gospel Brunch, open to kids, is an ideal spot for non-church-goers to enjoy it live. While the venue, part of a chain, masquerades by night as a gritty blues club, its rotating Sunday choirs show convincing religious ardour. Their voices and harmonies will give you shivers — certainly this withered old sinner was moved to tears. The brunch itself is loaded with classic Southern cookin’. You won’t go away hungry or disappointed.
As for fully satisfying deep cravings for the blues by nibbling on it on your holiday, that’s another story. The more you get, the more you’ll want to gorge yourself on Chicago’s bottomless music scene.
Our children — who decreed this “the best family vacation ever” — were dazzled at Lollapalooza’s children’s stage by Buddy Guy’s protege, a 14-yearold named Quinn Sullivan (who appears with Guy at Legends on Jan. 25).
“You’ll be headlining Lollapalooza in 2020,” our son told the guitar wunderkind as young Sullivan greeted fans.
In a perfect world, both our kids will be on hand to see it.