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The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer. For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest. From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.
Discover the living legacy of Chicago Blues in this guide to the iconic clubs and musicians who made—and keep making—music history. During the Great Migration, African Americans left Mississippi for Chicago, and they brought their music traditions with them. The music took root in the city and developed its own distinctive sound. Today, Chicago Blues is heard all over the world, but there’s no better place to experience it than in the city where it was born. In Exploring Chicago Blues, Chicago music writer Rosalind Cummings-Yeates takes you inside historic blues clubs like the Checkerboard Lounge and Gerri's Palm Tavern, where folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Ma Rainey transformed Chicago into the blues mecca. She then takes you on an insider’s tour of the contemporary blues scene, introducing the best spots to hear the purest sounds of Sweet Home Chicago.
Flerlage is one of the most recognized names in photography, and his photos of the Chicago Blues scene in the 1960s and 1970s have become legendary among Blues fans and aficionados. Here, for the first time, are Raeburn's best photos of America's greatest blues artists at the pinnalcles of their careers, reporudced in a beautiful format. From Howlin' Wolf performing at the legendary Pepper's lounge to Otis Spann and James Cotton playing Muddy Waters' basement, these pictures bring to life one of the most incredible periods in American musical history.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British blues fan Alan Harper became a transatlantic pilgrim to Chicago. "I've come here to listen to the blues," he told an American customs agent at the airport, and listen he did, to the music in its many styles, and to the men and women who lived it in the city's changing blues scene. Harper's eloquent memoir conjures the smoky redoubts of men like harmonica virtuoso Big Walter Horton and pianist Sunnyland Slim. Venturing from stageside to kitchen tables to the shotgun seat of a 1973 Eldorado, Harper listens to performers and others recollect memories of triumphs earned and chances forever lost, of deep wells of pain and soaring flights of inspiration. Harper also chronicles a time of change, as an up-tempo, whites-friendly blues eclipsed what had come before, and old Southern-born black players held court one last time before an all-conquering generation of young guitar aces took center stage.
The booming industries of Chicago acted as a magnet for rural migrants from the Delta region of North Western Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s. The often painful adjustments made by these new arrivals in the 'Windy City' led to the rise of a new musical form, an electrified urban version of the blues that was soon ringing out from the bars and clubs of the city's South Side. The impact that this music was to have on the development of popular music in the 20th century is impossible to overstate -- although its originators were often not the ones to pocket the profits. Blues lyrics -- concise, earthy, humorous, or downright dirty -- encapsulated the urban experience as no music had done before.
(Guitar Educational). As rhythm guitarist for blues legend Muddy Waters, Steady Rollin' Bob Margolin has gained invaluable experience in the art of Chicago blues rhythm guitar. And now in this exclusive and comprehensive book with video, Bob Margolin and blues author/historian Dave Rubin bring you the definitive instructional guitar method on the subject, featuring loads of rhythm guitar playing examples to learn and practice, covering a variety of styles, techniques, tips, historical anecdotes, and much more. To top it off, every playing example in the book is performed by Bob Margolin himself!
Includes hotels and restaurants; music clubs and bars; music landmarks; music festivals and events; interviews; jazz, blues, Cajun, zydeco, country, gospel, soul and rock and roll; and more.
This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing's long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B. As both an observer and performer, Cushing has been involved with the blues scene in Chicago for decades. His candid, colorful interviews with prominent blues players, producers, and deejays reveal the behind-the-scenes world of the formative years of recorded blues. Many of these oral histories detail the careers of lesser-known but greatly influential blues performers and promoters. The book focuses in particular on pre–World War II blues singers, performers active in 1950s Chicago, and nonperformers who contributed to the early blues world. Interviewees include Alberta Hunter, one of the earliest African American singers to transition from Chicago's Bronzeville nightlife to the international spotlight, and Ralph Bass, one of the greatest R&B producers of his era. Blues expert, writer, record producer, and cofounder of Living Blues Magazine Jim O'Neal provides the book's foreword.
“Sites provides crucial context on how Chicago’s Afrocentrist philosophy, religion, and jazz scenes helped turn Blount into Sun Ra.” —Chicago Reader Sun Ra (1914–93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra’s Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways. “Four stars . . . Sites makes the engaging argument that the idiosyncratic jazz legend’s penchant for interplanetary journeys and African American utopia was in fact inspired by urban life right on Earth.” —Spectrum Culture
Chicago has always had a reputation as a "wide open town" with a high tolerance for gangsters, illegal liquor, and crooked politicians. It has also been the home for countless black musicians and the birthplace of a distinctly urban blues-more sophisticated, cynical, and street-smart than the anguished songs of the Mississippi delta--a music called the Chicago blues. This is the history of that music and the dozens of black artists who congregated on the South and Near West Sides. Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, Tampa Red, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells, Eddie Taylor--all of these giants played throughout the city and created a musical style that had imitators and influence all over the world.