Chicago Blues

Chicago blues is what happened when the Delta blues met the electric guitar, the city, and a paycheck. The Great Migration had been carrying Black Mississippians up the Illinois Central line for decades; after the Second World War, the South Side and West Side were dense with Delta-born workers who wanted Saturday-night music that sounded like home — but loud enough to cut through a crowded club (Wilkerson 2010; Palmer 1981).

Muddy Waters, who had been recorded by Alan Lomax on Stovall Plantation in 1941, arrived in 1943, switched to electric guitar, and by 1948 was making hits for the label that became Chess Records. The classic band he assembled — amplified slide guitar, Little Walter’s harmonica blown through a handheld microphone, piano, bass and drums — turned the solo Delta form into ensemble music with a backbeat (Gordon 2002). His great rival Howlin’ Wolf, a Charley Patton disciple with a voice like a freight engine, arrived from Memphis in 1953, and their competition powered the style’s golden decade (Segrest & Hoffman 2004).

The songs Chess pressed in those years — “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Smokestack Lightnin’,” “Rollin’ Stone” — became the working curriculum for the next generation on both sides of the Atlantic. Chuck Berry walked into Chess in 1955 and turned the formula toward teenagers; a decade later, English bands who had learned every Chess record by heart (one of them named after “Rollin’ Stone”) sold the music back to white America. Both rock ‘n’ roll and the British blues revival are, genealogically, children of this music.