(return to Chicago essays)

(This essay is a transcript from the 3Cities Project Conference 'New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Cultures and Representation', Birmingham, Sept. 3-4, 1999)

I'm going to talk about the changing sound and social situation of Chicago blues as part of a larger inquiry into the cultural consequences and artifacts of changes in city life in the last half-century. I'm interested in the ways that material rearrangements--like redevelopment of neighborhoods, demographic successions, and shifts in the character of work--interact with changes in cultural style. Put another way, with the producer of culture as the agent, I want to show what city people working in different generic traditions have done with materials, conditions, and influences that surround them.

The book I'm writing examines cultural forms that were significantly shaped by the industrial urbanism that matured in the manufacturing cities of America between the Civil War and World War II. Each of these forms--I do sections on blues, boxing, crime stories, and arts/historical tourism--has entered an identifiable postindustrial phase in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s as the cities in which they are rooted have lost much--but not all--of their industrial character.

A set of large-scale urban processes frames this discussion. I'll give you an extremely compressed account of it before I get to the case of Chicago blues.

Since World War II, American cities--especially industrial and cultural capitals of the Northeast and Midwest, like Chicago--have undergone a significant transformation in form and function. The big story is the passing of the nineteenth century industrial city of downtown and neighborhoods and the emergence of the postindustrial metropolis of inner city and suburbs.

Think of the model industrial city that matured between the Civil War and World War II as a set of orders--spatial, economic, political, social. In the decades after World War II, those orders underwent significant linked changes. Interlocking flows of people, capital, power, and ideas remade the urban landscape. Starting in the '40s, period-defining folk migrations flowed into mid-century America's two promised lands: black Southerners to the Northern inner city, predominantly white urbanites to the suburbs. At the same time, public and private capital flowed from city to suburbs, from Rust Belt to Sunbelt, from inner-ring neighborhoods to redeveloped core, and, crucially, from manufacturing to the service sector.

Cities that had been organized primarily around the processing of raw materials into finished goods were significantly reorganized around the provision of services and handling of information. Coalitions of business and government built highways, airports, convention centers, highrise office buildings and residences, and other vital elements of the postindustrial city. To make room they cleared what had been vital elements of the industrial city--railroad tracks, factory belts, dense-packed workers' housing in urban villages and the Black Metropolis--all redefined as "blight."

I'm describing a body of interrelated changes that can go by many names because it has many parts. The term "postindustrial transformation" describes the material ground of change, but cultural orders--like Chicago blues--also traverse that ground and interact with it.

Now, to place this frame I've been outlining around Chicago blues: if industrial urbanism made possible the original synthesis called Chicago blues, then the postindustrial transformation of Chicago was crucial in unmaking that synthesis and enabling a revised synthesis--called by some the renaissance and by others the death of Chicago blues.

And you can hear those movements in the music itself; for instance, in the music of Buddy Guy, who has been generally regarded as a premier exponent of Chicago blues since Muddy Waters died in 1983. Guy's music is also a central battleground in the public struggle over the history, the future, and the present state of Chicago blues. One side, dominated by critics like Bill Dahl and a few musicians like Billy Branch, sees the music in steep artistic decline since its golden age in the '50s. These prophets of decline see Chicago blues in the '90s reduced to a hot-licks subset of guitar rock, a new Dixieland (with "Sweet Home Chicago" in the role of "When the Saints Come Marching In") designed to satisfy tourists seeking the authenticating sources of the rock aesthetic. I'll call the other side the boosters, a sort of Benetton universalist coalition led by successful blues players like Buddy Guy and entrepreneurial promoters like tourism commissioner Lois Weisberg and the people who run the House of Blues. They see Chicago blues and allied forms enjoying an era of widespread success in the '90s: celebrated as great art and party music, mainstreamed in everything from TV documentaries to advertising to sports talk radio, enjoying artistic respect and revived commercial circulation.

The debate between decline faction and boosters converges on Buddy Guy. Increases over the last forty years in the density and frenzy of his guitar playing, accompanied by verbal and musical homage from rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, the Rolling Stones, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, have turned Guy into an ur-guitar hero and also made him the decline faction's Exhibit A. Critics dismiss Guy's mature guitar style with recurring, resonant phrases: they say "he plays too many notes," which is shorthand for too much flash and not enough substance, and is usually applied to young white guitar wizards with weak blues sensibilities and no singing chops. The phrase is not usually applied to people like Guy--black, Southern-born, in his sixties, with impeccable blues credentials and a formidable singing voice. Decline-minded critics also frequently call his music "white noise," a way of describing what they hear as rock influences.

The "noisiness" of his playing--the ratio of sounds regarded by critics as extraneous or even antithetical to whatever orthodox blues signal they hear in his music--that "noisiness" has become more pronounced, and more lavishly recorded and circulated, as Guy has achieved long-delayed commercial success in the '90s. Now, finally, after a lifetime of debt and relative obscurity, he owns a profitable club, Buddy Guy's Legends; he has a long-term major-label recording contract; he turns up on big-time radio, the David Letterman show, and Saturday Night Live; he's featured in Gap ads and in the city of Chicago's tourism brochures; and the city's tourist and convention bureaus steer visitors to his club. According to the decline faction, the price of this success has been steep: Guy's not playing Chicago blues--or blues at all--anymore.

Seen from one angle, the opposing factions--both of them interracial coalitions--are debating racialized aesthetics. The argument for decline usually implies, and sometimes flat-out says, that the problem is one of people not knowing their place: black musicians inauthentically playing in a "white" way, white musicians inauthentically trying and failing to "sound black," white audiences inauthentically "acting black" in the cheapest kind of Saturday night appropriation rituals--a mutually degrading round of bad-faith love and theft. The boosters make a countervailing universalist argument about the declining musical significance of race--that Chicago blues was invented by Southern blacks but now belongs to everybody because it speaks to everybody. This "everybody gets the blues" argument tiptoes around the possibility that the social and cultural history of race in America does indeed inflect how the music is made and received.

Seen from another angle, the battle over Chicago blues is about change over time in generic orthodoxy: how much can a cultural form change without becoming fundamentally something else? What's still "Chicago" about a blues style circulated around the world, a style mutating in a million suburban basements and ten thousand Blue Monday open mike jams far from the South Side, a style encountered by its primary financial supporters at theme-park chain clubs or on car stereos as they tool from subdivision to office park?

I suggest we survey the debate and the music from a third, perhaps more commanding, perspective afforded by my inquiry: the often ungenerous and tautologically deadlocked controversies over the relative whiteness, blackness, and Chicago-ness of Chicago blues engage piecemeal with the postindustrial transformation of a musical style and the city to which it has been traditionally attached.

I want us to hear great flows of people, resources, power, and ideas in Buddy Guy's inspired, often astonishing, and sometimes frustrating guitar playing and singing over the last four decades. (For those reading this paper on the website, I recommend listening to the following in order to outline the progression: first, some of Guy's early singles, a few of which can be found on the CD collection The Very Best of Buddy Guy; then the albums A Man and the Blues, Stone Crazy, and Slippin' In, in that order.) I don't want to reduce Buddy Guy to a conduit of material conditions, and I feel obliged to regard aspects of his or anybody's musical intelligence as irrecoverably personal and beyond my ability to explain, but the effects of even the most deeply personal artistic impulses can be historicized by locating Guy and his music in relation to changes in genre, audiences, institutions, and the social landscape of Chicago.

I'll do history, then style.

History

The historical argument begins by linking genre to industrial urbanism: Chicago blues can be described as the product of an industrial migration.

This phase of the story is familiar and I'll only remind you of its features. The strongest pushes and pulls guiding black migration to the North included manufacturing booms and labor shortages associated with the World Wars, especially the second. Add to that the mechanization of Southern agriculture and the enabling function of railroads, the paradigmatic high-industrial transport technology (which still pervades the blues soundscape). These industrial pushes and pulls were essential to delivering a critical mass of Southern blacks to Chicago by the '50s, including the musicians, initial audience, and many of the business people who shaped the Chicago style.

That critical mass produced the golden age of Chicago blues in the '50s and early '60s. Among the many blues styles in Chicago the label "Chicago blues" became attached to the adaptation of Mississippi Delta style effected in the '50s by codifiers, especially Muddy Waters, and the cohort of second-wave successors who extended their formulas, led by Otis Rush, Magic Sam, and Buddy Guy. These emblematic Chicago stylists made the most of electric amplification, a hard regularization of an often irregular country beat, and the tension between acrobatically lyrical lines of voice or guitar and a dense, grounded, driving ensemble sound. Of all the blues genres, Chicago style grinds the hardest and soars the highest over that grind, producing a peculiarly sharp dynamic of tension, release, and emotional force. The makers of this style commanded the attention of an expanding black audience with music singularly expressive of the encounter with industrial urbanism--expressive in theme and in the juxtaposition of strong, Southern-accented feeling with mechanized, routinized, mass produced--that is, industrialized--sound and experience. Ground zero of the Chicago blues synthesis was Bronzeville, the relatively self-contained Black Metropolis on the South Side given cohesion by the dynamics of migration and segregation. It was home not only to inspired musicians and enthusiastic audiences, but also to institutions--the independent record companies and blues clubs that nurtured, housed, and circulated the music.

This is the most familiar phase--the industrial--in the long, richly intertwined history of blues and work. It overlaps on its front end with the agrarian phase and on its back end with what I call the postindustrial. I want to concentrate on the latter, less familiar phase, in particular on the movement of the blues from the South Side of Chicago to the North Side beginning in the '60s.

If the Great Migration was an industrial folk migration, the migrants arrived in an increasingly postindustrial city. That would be evident to all when the city's heavy industries finally collapsed in the '70s, but already in the '50s, sensitive urbanists felt tectonic shifts beneath the surface of the postwar boom. Especially for black migrants, cities in transition like Chicago increasingly failed to provide the same structure of opportunity they had provided during their high-industrial periods.

Two elements of this story have special importance for Chicago blues. One is the breakup of the Black Metropolis and the formation of the second ghetto on the South and West Sides. Capital flight, the partial departure of the black middle class, and policy initiatives like the replacement of neighborhoods with highrise housing projects all contributed to the destruction of Bronzeville's small business sector. That included blues clubs and independent record labels. At the same time, as Southern migration slowed, stopped, and eventually reversed, the Southerners who invented and initially supported Chicago blues began to age out.

The other piece of the story is the growth, especially on the North Side lakefront, of redeveloped districts that housed the postindustrial city's growing numbers of information handlers, symbolic analysts, professionals, and service workers. They invested in a whole new set of cultural and economic institutions, including not only places to get arugula but also the clubs and record labels that now constitute the institutional home of Chicago blues. Most of these new supporters were--and are--white.

It's an oversimplification to say that starting in the '60s younger blacks turned away from Chicago blues and whites replaced them, but it's also significantly true. Ben Hampton, manager of the South Side's most successful surviving club, the Checkerboard Lounge, says, "Wasn't for the white people, we wouldn't have survived." Alligator Records and Living Blues Magazine, two leading blues institutions founded in Chicago in the early '70s, have surveyed their customers and found they serve essentially the same population: overwhelmingly white, male, for the most part middle aged, educated, and middle class. These are boomers, mostly, who came to blues through folk music (if they are a little older), through what is now known as classic rock (Eric Clapton or the Rolling Stones, usually), or through Stevie Ray Vaughan (if they are a little younger). For at least a generation, this cohort has dominated the urban blues audience, especially in the case of the increasingly rock-identified, guitar-centered Chicago style (as opposed to its polar opposite, the voice-centered soul-blues style popular in the South).

That's not to say that black people don't listen to Chicago blues, but the CD-buying and festival-going audience is overwhelmingly white, for two decades most of Chicago's clubs have been on the North Side and filled with white people, most of the South and West Side clubs have shut down or only stage live music on weekends (and rely on white audiences to stay in business), few blues headliners play regularly on the South or West Side, and the increasingly important tourist audience (also preponderantly white) is heavily concentrated downtown and on the North Side.

So there has been a shift, driven and inflected significantly by postindustrial forces, in the core audience for Chicago blues from black, Southern-born, and working-class to white, Northern-born, and middle-class--the latter group often deeply engaged with blues as roots music or exotica, but steeped in classic rock aesthetics and rarely trained in the black Southern artistic and religious traditions that animated the original Chicago blues synthesis. The same increasingly holds true of the black middle-class audience for Chicago blues and of new musicians entering the business as apprentices.

Buddy Guy in context

Now let's put Buddy Guy in motion through this changing social and cultural landscape. George "Buddy" Guy came from rural Louisiana to Chicago on the train called The City of New Orleans in 1957. Once in town, he entered and rose in the blues hierarchy by plugging himself into existing institutional structures: the South and West Side club circuits, where he was discovered; the Muddy Waters band; Chess Records and other independent labels for which he recorded as sideman and then frontman. But by the '60s this institutional structure was under a variety of pressures--the postindustrial pressures I've detailed, as well as others I will mention--and losing coherence as an enabling framework for the industrial blues synthesis. That process, manifested as weak sales for traditional Chicago blues, loosened up the field of musical possibility but also deprived Guy of a straight and narrow generic path. Chicago blues passed through a period of overlap and adjustment in the late '60s and '70s until it stabilized in postindustrial form in the '80s and '90s.

We can track Guy's material engagement with the histories of Chicago and the blues business through his investments in blues institutions. In 1972, he bought the Checkerboard Lounge, in the heart of Bronzeville. It was on 43rd Street, which in the '50s had been a booming commercial strip with several blues clubs. By the '70s, 43rd was a postindustrial cliché: desolate, lined with abandoned and ruined buildings, punctuated by the usual storefront churches, liquor stores, and check cashing joints. In the interim, urban renewal had flowed over the area, wiping out the local small business sector and leaving the monumental Robert Taylor Homes and other housing projects as second-ghetto moraines. Guy toured to support the club, which lost money from day one but was the flagship of the surviving South Side clubs. These were Guy's lean years, the '70s and early '80s, when he was a guitar prophet without a record contract in his own land. He lost the Checkerboard in a dirty business deal in 1985, freeing him to follow the money and action downtown.

Four years later, in 1989, Guy opened Legends, a much larger and profitable club in the South Loop, which was once a light manufacturing and flophouse district--that is, an industrial area--and is now one of Chicago's fastest-growing commercial and residential loft conversion zones, a classically postindustrial reuse of building stock. Legends is downtown, across the street from the Hilton, where tourists, conventioneers, suburbanites, North Siders, and occasional South Siders can get to it. It's a very efficient, professional operation. In addition to music seven nights a week, it sells tee shirts and other merchandise, and overcharges for authenticatingly unhealthy Louisiana cooking. Guy has a web site, a newsletter, and 45 employees. And he has been negotiating to open another branch of Legends in the House of Blues Hotel twenty blocks away.

Guy has been especially shrewd and forward-looking in exploiting the growing symbiosis between Chicago blues and tourism. Having moved downtown and to the North Side, the blues business increasingly depends on and has a significant role in the city's increasingly important tourist economy. The city's latest numbers show that business travelers spent 5 billion dollars in Chicago in 1997 and pleasure travelers spent another 2.8 billion--together generating 110,000 jobs. Add to that the vital importance of the culture business to attracting and retaining taxpaying property owners and money-spending renters. As Lois Weisberg, the Mayor's Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, says, "First you make a city interesting to its own people; then the visitors will come." Chicago continues to mature as a postindustrial city that sells services, atmosphere, and experiences rather than locally manufactured goods or animal parts, and blues enjoys corresponding new importance in the packaging of Chicago-ness. As a synergistic means to sell dinners, hotel rooms, transportation, and so on, the blues is a bow on the ribbon of the package Chicago sells to tourists, hinterlanders, suburbanites, and its own citizens. Lois Weisberg explained it like this: "Look, the first thing everybody says is 'Where are the blues?' Not 'Where's Michael Jordan?' or 'Where's the architecture?' Chicago is the nation's premier cultural tourism destination. Blues is part of the appeal."

The city steers visitors to its outdoor blues festival in June, and year-round it steers them to blues clubs. Bus tours of Bronzeville, the original home of Chicago blues, are the most popular part of the official neighborhood tours program. A recent redevelopment boom along the south lakefront and in Bronzeville has revived the prospects of a plan cooked up in the '80s by neighborhood developers and the city for a reconstituted blues district along 43rd Street, already renamed Muddy Waters Drive. It's part of a larger impulse to exploit the artistic and historical resonances of black Chicago that, for better or worse, are most effectively compressed for marketing and consumption in the form of Chicago blues. With the advent in the '90s of the downtown House of Blues and the recent opening of the adjoining House of Blues hotel--a hermetically imagineered theme park that formalizes the informal relationship suggested by the proximity of Buddy Guy's Legends to the Hilton--the union of Chicago blues and tourism has entered its Disney phase.

The manager of the House of Blues might have been talking about the whole city when he told me, "Blues is a hook for the resell."

In fact, one might see the current marketing of postindustrial cities as a struggle to show that the attractions of "culture" trump the fear of inner cities cultivated by crime stories, the calculus of racial anxiety, and all the other deep-rooted antiurban sentiments that wound into a still-tight knot during the urban crisis of the '60s. Looking back at that crisis now, we might regard it as the traumatic emergence of the postindustrial inner city on the American scene, an order of things we may finally be getting used to. Beginning at the tail end of that crisis, Buddy Guy embarked on a decades-long series of moves that made him the Chicago blues scene's most powerful artist-businessman, positioned to circulate his music and prosper. He has done that in great part by harnessing postindustrial flows that remade the city and the blues business.

Style

Now, having attached Guy and the blues business to the changing landscape, let's turn more briefly to style. Guy has led the way in effecting the single most important formal change in Chicago blues since the '50s: the rising proportional importance of guitar and the corresponding decline in the importance of singing. When I talked about it with Bruce Iglauer, the schizophrenically decline-minded booster who founded Alligator Records, he gestured at a pile of packages against one wall of his office and said, "See that? Those are audition recordings. I guarantee you that for 70 percent of those my letter back will say, If you had taken as much time thinking about your singing as your guitar playing, you would have a tape that I might want to listen to. Singing is the one most important thing in Chicago blues, and it's getting hard to find people--any people, black or white--who can sing." Now, Buddy Guy can sing, and very well, but mostly he plays a lot of loud, fast electric guitar, and that's the generic standard in Chicago blues these days.

It is no longer possible to say that most of this guitar playing advertises itself as an extension of the human voice raised in song. The identity between voice and instrument was once the fundamental aesthetic building block of Delta style and early Chicago style. We can, following an argument made by Bruce Iglauer, trace the decline of singing in the genre to the decreasing Southerness of African American culture, especially church musical culture, in post-migration Chicago. And, following Billy Branch, we can factor in the defunding of music education in public schools. We can trace the expansion of the guitar's role to the classic rock aesthetic that has made the guitar solo paramount in the musical calculus of ecstatic experience. Commercially and artistically, blues has become junior partner in the blues-rock synthesis that has recruited the lion's share of Guy's audience since the '60s. And Guy comes at least halfway to that audience's aesthetic ground by playing extended solos that depart from blues orthodoxy as defined in the '50s.

But we should hesitate--as always when faced with a decline or a booster narrative--we should hesitate to accept the characterization of Guy's stylistic evolution as a simple case of focus-group musicianship. We have to reckon with the fact that Guy's longstanding, relentless will to abstraction predates the rise of classic rock and of his most noise-friendly disciples, like Jimi Hendrix.

Guy has always been motivated by a desire to overleap the musical boundaries of blues orthodoxy to ramble in the fields of guitar noise beyond. In the early '50s he was already experimenting with feedback, distortion, and other effects that injured the sensibilities of his orthodox elders. In the early '60s, when he was established as a sideman, he experimented with these effects at the Chess Records studios, only to be shot down by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Leonard Chess, who all insisted that he stop making "noise." There's that word again. Until the city's transformation pulled the rug out from under the industrial blues synthesis--and until the British Invasion, the rise of soul, and the rise to hegemonic power of the teenage consumer changed the genre map of popular music--the blues establishment in Chicago was institutionally strong enough to police Guy's tendency toward "out" playing. Record producers, club owners, and mentor-masters could point to the bottom line--sales of a proven product to a loyal audience--to curb what they heard as his excesses.

But Guy's pressing against the boundaries of blues genre--evident in the exciting music he made as a young man--made him a mentor to the founding generation of rock guitar heros, even younger men (many of them British) who tried to make themselves in his image. Guy wasn't playing rock, but he was attempting explorations rooted in and extending beyond Chicago blues norms, a model for the rockers' project. Now, in the '90s, Guy has led the way in redefining Chicago orthodoxy in partnership with fans who have built their musical intelligence around just those rock guitar heros who imitated Guy in the '60s. Also, and not incidentally, Guy now enjoys financial control over his career--he owns Legends and he has his major-label recording contract (because ex-acolytes like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones helped him get it). So Guy is in a position to let himself go, unpoliced, where he always wanted to go and please his core audience by doing it.

I've been describing a case of reflexive influence--the rock-star students have ironically made the world safe for the bluesman teacher whose genius they imitated and helped consign to obscurity for decades--but it's also a case of cultural history bringing the prevailing musical aesthetic into alignment with an individual artist's proclivities. I wouldn't presume to account for Guy's love of feedback and thirty-chorus solos, but I have presumed to identify processes that helped turn Chicago blues in that direction.

A palimpsest and a bluesy condition

Finally, by way of conclusion, the history I've been arguing for helps explain the logic--the form--of a typical Buddy Guy live set. He opens with a classic Chicago shuffle and then a slow blues, traditional tunes that feature his most forceful singing and most orthodox, controlled guitar playing of the evening. As the set proceeds, he sings less and his solos become vast, ringing washes of sound with recognizable Chicago blues figures buried deeper and deeper within them. After a while his audience begins to feel a bit bludgeoned--they get disoriented because his flights into guitaristic abstraction have lost contact with the defining generic ground from which they departed. It's like watching boxing reduced to a series of tightly edited, bone-cracking knockout punches: one feels gorged by this diet of all-highlights-all-the-time and one wishes for the pattern of rest, motion, and narrative development that structures a fight.

Something like this happens at every Buddy Guy performance, and, since he reads crowds well, he has developed a programmatic response. When he senses the audience's guitar-induced brain fatigue he shushes his band of young white apprentices and regrounds the set by presenting a history of the Chicago blues tradition in medley form. In the '70s, when he was struggling to make ends meet at the Checkerboard, his medleys would invoke founding urban influences like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, and Jimmy Reed. Guy, feeling the middleness of his musical situation, would aim jabs at Chicago blues orthodoxy and at rock: he would usually throw in a fugitive riff from Cream, but not play the song, to tease the rock-minded; and he would poke a little fun at Muddy Waters, adding a "ho, ho, ho" to his version of "Mannish Boy" to twit the portly, aging king of Chicago blues. That ended abruptly when Muddy Waters died in 1983 and Guy ascended to the throne. In the '90s, Guy still invokes Muddy Waters as Mosaic founder to open every medley, but he follows with full-blown renditions, not dismissive teasers, of classic rock chestnuts by Clapton, Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

His set is a palimpsest, a layered model of Chicago blues history: from industrial to postindustrial synthesis, from vocal to guitar music, from folk origins to assimilation by rock, from a form of popular culture grounded in the Black Metropolis to a museum-quality roots concert music housed in the precincts of the service-professional classes.

Depending on who's telling which fragment of this story, Chicago blues can be seen as dying or booming, rising or falling, developing or decaying. The blues is all right and the blues is not all right. It's in a distinctly bluesy condition.

Carlo Rotella, Boston College
rotellca@bc.edu