Chicago blues

In May 1943 a musician named McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, boarded a train in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His destination was Chicago. Waters was one of millions of African Americans who made the journey from the rural South to the urban North in the early and mid-20th century. But his arrival in Chicago was of special consequence for the city and for popular music. By the 1950s he and several other musicians were performing a new style of music called Chicago blues, an amplified, guitar-led electric blues that became the foundation for rock and roll and rhythm and blues (R&B).

Beginning in the Mississippi Delta

Technique and instruments

The roots of Chicago blues are in Delta blues, an acoustic style that originated in the Delta region of northwestern Mississippi. Delta blues of the early 20th century was primarily performed by solo male musicians, in particular, singer-guitarists. Compared with the blues styles of other Southern regions, Delta blues was distinguished by its emotional intensity, which was projected through the lyrics of the songs and underscored by the players’ often aggressive attack on the guitar strings.

Among the musical techniques used by Delta blues artists were the slide technique, in which players slid a bottleneck or metal object (such as a knife) along the guitar’s fingerboard to bend notes and produce a plaintive, whining sound, and a reliance on vamps, or repeated chord progressions that precede the entrance of the voice. Delta musicians also often used call-and-response patterns, which were common in African music and were used in other blues styles and in African American sacred music, including spirituals. In Delta blues, however, the call-and-response was typically between the singer’s voice (the call) and a melodic phrase on the guitar (the response).

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Many of these techniques are heard in Chicago blues. The key differences between the styles are that Chicago blues uses electric instruments and amplifiers and is played by an ensemble rather than a solo musician. Along with electric guitar, the instruments common to Chicago blues include drums, harmonica, piano, double bass, and electric bass.

Additionally, whereas Delta blues was played in rural juke joints and on plantations and small-town street corners, Chicago blues was played on busy city streets (such as the outdoor Maxwell Street Market on the Near West Side) and in crowded nightclubs. To be heard above the din, the musicians and their instruments needed to be loud. Not only were the guitar and bass amplified, but the harmonica was played into a microphone or through a small-wattage tube amplifier, producing distortion. The combination of these augmented instruments lent Chicago blues its distinctive gritty sound.

The Great Migration

Blues was brought to Chicago by Waters and other Southern-born musicians such as Big Bill Broonzy and Howlin’ Wolf during the Great Migration. From 1916 to 1970 an estimated six million Black Southerners relocated to the Northern and Western United States in search of a better standard of living and an escape from segregation and other forms of racial violence. Many African Americans relocated during World War II (1939–45), when more jobs were being offered because of the war effort. This mass exodus is the primary reason for the spread of blues and jazz to Northern urban centers such as Chicago, Cleveland, and New York City.

In Chicago the bulk of the newcomers settled on the South Side, close to the city’s industrial belt of steel mills and manufacturers. Waters, for example, went from sharecropping and driving a tractor on a plantation near Clarksdale to working in a paper mill and driving a truck in Chicago. Among the items that were manufactured in the city were guitars, including such brands as Silvertone, Harmony, National, Supro, and Kay. Between the 1930s and ’60s, Chicago was the guitar-making capital of the world.

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Musicians

Long before he traveled north, Waters learned to play harmonica and guitar, influenced by such Delta blues legends as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Son House. In Mississippi he made a few early recordings for U.S. Library of Congress archivist Alan Lomax, but it was in Chicago that Waters was given his first electric guitar, by his uncle in 1944.

By 1948 Waters was working with a local label that would become the fabled Chess Records, for which he recorded electric versions of songs that he had recorded for Lomax, including “I Feel Like Going Home” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” These were the seminal cuts of Chicago blues.

They were also the beginning of a string of hits for Waters on the Chess label. Two songs, “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy,” were especially influential. “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” released in 1954, inspired Bo Diddley, another Mississippi transplant in Chicago, to record “I’m a Man” (1955), a riposte that used the same stop-time rhythm and call-and-response technique as Waters’s song. Diddley’s song became a huge R&B hit and paved the way for that genre’s transition to rock and roll. Not one to be bested at his own game, Waters replied later in 1955 with the ferocious “Mannish Boy.”

Waters’s early band included other seminal Chicago blues musicians: pianist Otis Spann, guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and harmonica player Little Walter. Born Marion Walter Jacobs in Louisiana, Little Walter eventually led his own bands. A virtuoso on the harmonica, he pioneered the practice of playing the instrument directly into a handheld microphone and developed radically expressive techniques to enhance his playing.

Both Waters and Little Walter benefited from the songwriting talent of Willie Dixon, a gospel-trained, Mississippi-born bassist who worked for Chess. Dixon penned Waters’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” and Little Walter’s “My Babe” as well as “Bring It on Home” for harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II (so called because he was the second harmonica blues musician to perform under that name) and “The Red Rooster” and “Back Door Man” for guitarist Howlin’ Wolf, one of Chicago blues’ most formidable musicians. Howlin’ Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett in Mississippi and played in West Memphis, Arkansas, before migrating to Chicago in the 1950s. With his booming, raspy voice and aggressive stage presence, he became a vital influence on many rock musicians.

Among other formative Chicago blues musicians were harmonica player and guitarist Jimmy Reed, whose hits included “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” and “Bright Lights, Big City,” Elmore James, the “King of the Slide Guitar” who produced such classics as “Dust My Broom” and “The Sky Is Crying,” and Buddy Guy, a Louisiana-born, guitar-playing protégé of Waters who performed into the 21st century.

Traditional Delta blues was predominantly performed by male musicians, but female blues artists such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith rose to the forefront in other regions of the South. In Chicago the long-reigning “Queen of the Blues” was Koko Taylor, a Tennessee transplant and former housekeeper who was discovered by Dixon one night while singing in a Chicago blues club. Known for her deep, powerful vocals, Taylor achieved massive success in 1965 with “Wang Dang Doodle,” which was written by Dixon and became a top-five R&B hit. Among Chicago’s other prominent blueswomen are Sharon Lewis, Karen Carroll, and Demetria Taylor.

Record labels

The Chicago blues style was promoted by several local record labels that helped the music find national and global audiences. Among the most famous of these was Chess Records, owned by Polish immigrant brothers Phil and Leonard Chess, who bought the Aristocrat Record Company on the South Side and renamed it in 1950. Chess signed such artists as Waters, Diddley, Williamson, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, and Chuck Berry. The Chess brothers also employed Dixon full time as the label’s in-house bassist and arranger.

In 1953 Vivian (“Vee”) Carter and James (“Jay”) Bracken launched Vee Jay Records in a record store in Gary, Indiana. Vee Jay soon became the most successful Black-owned record company of the period, and Carter and Bracken eventually married and relocated the label to Chicago’s South Side. Vee Jay’s roster of artists included Reed and John Lee Hooker as well as vocal groups such as the Spaniels and the Four Seasons. In 1964 the label released the Beatles’ first American album, Introducing…the Beatles.

Another important local label was Delmark Records, founded as Delmar Records by Robert Koester in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1953. Five years later Koester moved to Chicago, where he set up a record shop downtown and rechristened the label Delmark. The company came under new ownership in the 21st century, but it remains a respected purveyor of such blues artists as Junior Wells, Joe Williams, T-Bone Walker, Big Time Sarah, Demetria Taylor, Arthur Crudup, Robert Nighthawk, and Luther Allison.

In 1971 a former Delmark employee, Cincinnati, Ohio, native Bruce Iglauer, founded Alligator Records. After signing its inaugural artist, Hound Dog Taylor & the HouseRockers, Alligator landed Koko Taylor a few years later and eventually recorded non-Chicago musicians such as Texans Albert Collins and Johnny Winter and Louisiana-born Clifton Chenier and Professor Longhair.

Nightclubs and neighborhoods

Chicago’s South Side, especially its Bronzeville neighborhood, has been home to many nightclubs that fostered the development of urban blues. Among the most famous of the Bronzeville joints was the 708 Club, which often featured such luminaries as Waters, Diddley, Elmore James, Memphis Minnie, Sunnyland Slim, and Howlin’ Wolf. Legend has it that in 1957 Waters met the 21-year-old Buddy Guy outside the 708 Club, days after the young guitarist had arrived in the city. Also in Bronzeville was the Regal Theater, a popular venue on the Chitlin Circuit that in November 1964 hosted a celebrated concert by guitarist B.B. King. The album from that performance, Live at the Regal (1965), is one of King’s best, along with his Live in Cook County Jail, recorded in Chicago in 1970 and released the following year.

Another renowned Bronzeville haunt was the Checkerboard Lounge, opened in 1972 by Guy and L.C. Thurman. Along with the usual Chicago blues stars, one night in 1981 the lounge was visited by several members of the Rolling Stones, who joined Waters, Guy, harmonica player Junior Wells, and guitarist Lefty Dizz on a few songs; the all-star jam was later released as a live album. Other venerated South Side joints included Pepper’s Lounge, the Dew Drop Inn, and Theresa’s Lounge, the latter of which was tucked away in the basement of an apartment building.

On the city’s West Side, the site of storied clubs such as Silvio’s as well as the Maxwell Street Market, blues musicians developed a style of electric blues in the 1950s that typically included a horn section (prefiguring soul music). Many of their songs were issued on Delmark and the short-lived Cobra Records. Notable musicians of the West Side style included Guy, Otis Rush, and Magic Sam, who was perhaps best known for amplifying and popularizing Robert Johnson’s acoustic composition “Sweet Home Chicago.”

Influence

With its driving rhythms and use of electric instruments, Chicago blues had a profound impact on the development of two styles of popular music that dominated the charts in the latter half of the 20th century: rock and roll and R&B. A number of mid-20th-century musicians, such as Diddley, are sometimes categorized as blues and rock or R&B artists because their recordings bridged several styles. More than a handful of Chicago blues musicians have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Chicago blues especially impressed the young generation of British musicians who began performing what became known as British blues in the 1950s and ’60s. Two English-born musicians, guitarist Alexis Korner and harmonica player Cyril Davies, were among the first to introduce blues to London audiences. Especially enamored of Waters and the Chess roster of artists were multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, singer Mick Jagger, and guitarist Keith Richards, who in the early 1960s formed the Rolling Stones (their name was taken from one of Waters’s songs) with bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts. Other British fans who formed blues-based bands were guitarist Eric Clapton (the Yardbirds and Cream), guitarist John Mayall (the Bluesbreakers), singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), and singer Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath). The genre that they played eventually morphed into rock and heavy metal—all of it grounded in Chicago blues.

In the United States rock musicians such as Chuck Berry recorded with Chicago blues labels (Chess). Jimi Hendrix used Chicago-style electrification and distortion to propel rock music into new sonic territories. Various films have paid homage to Chicago blues. Among the most popular was John Landis’s The Blues Brothers (1980), a comedy starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Its memorable music sequences include a scene at the Maxwell Street Market with John Lee Hooker performing his 1962 Vee Jay single “Boom Boom.”

The annual Chicago Blues Festival was founded in 1984, the year after Waters’s death. It has grown into the world’s largest free music festival honoring the blues. In 1990 Chess Records’ office and studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue was designated a city landmark. Waters’s longtime home at 4339 South Lake Park Avenue in Chicago’s North Kenwood neighborhood was made a landmark in 2021.

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