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ERIC CLAPTON CROSSROADS GUITAR FESTIVAL CHICAGO
Rebroadcasting on March 19, 2008 on PBS (check local listings)
Premiered on November 28, 2007 on PBS
ESSAY
CHICAGO BLUES
By Robert Santelli
For Southern blues musicians in the years before, during, and just after World War II, Chicago was a city of dreams. Situated in the middle of the country, with its towering buildings and wide boulevards, its bustling shopping and smoke-belching factories, and most importantly, its seemingly endless economic opportunities, Chicago offered two things missing in the black South: hope and promise.
Bluesmen saw the city no differently than most other poverty-stricken African Americans mired in a swamp of racial oppression and inequality. In the South, Jim Crow was king and the prospect of a new life beyond its control was remote, to say the least.
For some blacks, though, relocation became a reality, through a dogged determination to take a chance -- perhaps the biggest chance of their lives -- and head north. In the early part of the 20th century, economic calamity brought on by the boll weevil, a beetle that devastated the cotton crop, and a few years later, the Great Depression put Southern black people on the road and the rails. Thousands of black sharecroppers, farmers, and their families moved north and resettled in Northern cities. Many came to Chicago.
Bluesmen came too. Transplanted, homesick Southern folk trying to make sense of the big city gave them a ready and willing audience. Those blacks who had found jobs and had money in their pockets were not afraid to spend some of it on music, an absolute staple of their culture, no matter where they resided. For bluesmen, there was also the promise of making records in Chicago and not having to travel from juke joint to juke joint to make enough money to eat and get them to the next sleepy Southern town.
Blind Lemon Jefferson, the great Texas bluesman, had come to Chicago in the 1920s to become a recording star, and he did, but didn't live long enough to enjoy it. In 1929 he froze to death on a Chicago street corner while waiting for his ride. Others, such as Big Bill Broonzy, fared much better. Broonzy, who had been born in Mississippi, unknowingly created the musical template that so many other bluesmen would embrace once they arrived in the city: sing and play a brand of blues steeped in the music's Southern rural roots, but include elements of its new urban home, namely, discreet elements of jazz and later, amplification.
Big Bill Broonzy made a batch of records for a label called Bluebird, a subsidiary of the Victor Record Company, and black Southern newcomers to Chicago and other Northern cities listened and danced to them as if they were vital cultural nourishment. Tampa Red created similar blues sounds, as did one of the few female blues artists popular in the 1930s, Memphis Minnie.
Big Bill, Memphis Minnie, and Tampa Red played the guitar; others who came to Chicago in the prewar years played piano and found work in the increasing number of black saloons and clubs sprouting up on the city's South Side, a rugged neighborhood where blacks who migrated to Chicago usually settled, and where the best blues outside the South could be heard.
After the outbreak of World War II, Chicago saw yet another black migration from the South and a new influx of young black bluesmen eager to carve out a living there. The war opened up new jobs on factory assembly lines and in steel mills. Thousands of blacks arrived on the Illinois Central and found jobs waiting to be filled, as the armed forces -- still segregated -- enlisted just about every able white man to fight in Europe and the Pacific.
Top banner photo: Festival stage at Chicago's Toyota Park (credit: Dave Allocca, Starpix)
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photo: Sheryl Crow
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