The latest issue of Living Blues magazine (issue number 196) is devoted to the current Chicago blues scene, just in time for the Chicago Blues festival. There’s a nice letter from Barack Obama (as a home-state senator) in the issue. Here’s a pdf of the letter. He thanks the folks at Living Blues for the issue, noting that the “history of the Blues and the history of Chicago are inseparable….” He thanks the magazine for “continuing to tell the story of the Blues and the story of my hometown. … Like the city of Chicago, the music is alive and even though it is constantly adapting and incorporates new influences, its soul remains unchanged.” That last sentence captures the mandate of Living Blues magazine to a “t.”
The issue contains an article by Scott Barretta profiling Chicago artists and describing a typical week in Chicago Blues (Scott comments on this site and I’ve posted a couple of his iphone photos). The two Barretta articles come with excellent photographs from Bill Steber. Jim DiKoster and others provide lists of best Chicago blues albums and singles through the years, the founding LB editor provides an account of the Chicago Blues festival through the years, and David Whiteis a piece on the Chicago soul scene. There’s an article about what’s left of Maxwell Street (the post I did about Robert Nighthawk had footage from Maxwell Street) and lots more. Anyone interested in the Chicago Blues scene, past, present, or future, needs this issue.
I have always been fascinated by the music links between North and South based on the railroads routes.
Chicago became jazz and blues because that is where the Illinois Central led from New Orleans through the Mississippi Delta.
The Motown Sound came from the gospel singers who took the railroad out of Alabama to Detroit.
I am sure that Philly Soul and the distinctive sounds in other Northern cities also were heavily influenced by the source of the black migration in the middle of the 20th Century.
Bessie Smith went from Chatanooga to New York and Alberta Hunter from Memphis t to Chicago.
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee? east TN and NC to New York.
In some ways it sort of funneled up the Mississippi River valley from here– St. Louis was also a major stopping point (Henry Townsend, Ike Turner, J.D. Short had important time there, among many others)