- Sweet Home - 

Chicago

[Blues in Chicago]

[Gospel in Chicago]

[Jazz in Chicago]

[the Roots of Gospel Music]

Chicago skyline (photo: David Persson) 

       Chicago can be found stretching alongside the south-western edges of the shores of the mighty impressing Lake Michigan in the state of Illinois, the heartland of America. The city is due to its border country location to the Midwest regarded as the proud capital of the American Midwest, and as United States third largest city, population vise. However, despite being a world-class city inhabited by countless of skyscrapers, one can still find numerous of inviting and breathtaking beaches (actually resembling those found in the Mediterranean Sea) situated in the heart of the city. A stroll along the Chicago shores of Lake Michigan could thus make up a rather paradoxical mix of natural beauty and man-made views. Also known as the ‘Windy City’, Chicago has during the years made itself famous for being one of the foremost and most innovative cities in the United States in terms of musical achievements. The city can very easily pride itself for giving birth to both the electric blues, as well as the traditional gospel music, and for making substantial contributions to the evolvement of jazz during the twentieth century.

       Through the centuries, Chicago has also been known to dwell upon an utterly diverse population, spanning from notorious gangsters to (in)famous politicians and every category in between. The city’s repute has, however, during the past few decades changed substantially, from being regarded as a large, but ‘farm-like’ city, it has evolved into a ‘hip’ and flourishing example of an emerging financial and economical center in the United States.

Otha's Soul Food restaurant at 47th street, South Side Chicago. (photo: David Persson)

During the later part of the nineteenth century, Chicago came to grow in a most rampant way following the pressure of an increasing number of immigrants of vast nationalities. Consequently, the city and its industrial capacity came to gain a rapid and extensive momentum. In particular, the amount of slaughterhouses came to grow at a constant and rampant pace which quickly earned Chicago a rather comical nickname: Pork Town, or Americas number one capital amid the slaughtering business. At this particular point in history, Chicago and its vicinity were also the final destination for many of the Scandinavian immigrants that came to the United States. In fact, the flow of immigrants was during the early twentieth century so massive that Chicago came to emerge as the second largest Swedish city in the world, population vise, after Stockholm.        However, it was not only foreign immigrants that were attracted to the city of Chicago and the various job opportunities that could be found amid the city and other areas in the industrial north. During a number of consecutive decades, from the early twentieth century and even up until today, millions and millions of black men and women came to migrate, primarily from the American South, to cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago. Between 1915 and 1960, it is estimated that more 500,000 blacks alone migrated from the deep American South to the city of Chicago.

       The main pull-factors for many blacks were of course better job opportunities and a dream about a new and better life in freedom. But, on their northern journey, they also brought with them an exceedingly rich and solid musical heritage that forever would alter the way we look upon music. It was a heritage deeply and firmly rooted in the culture of the African continent, permeated by all its harmonies and melodic and complex rhythms, but nonetheless, it was also vastly incorporated and inspired by the new culture and all its musical ingredients. By applying their inherent and expressive African culture on the music and culture of the new world, the black slaves of the American South came to engender a totally new musical mindset, sprung out of the deepest and most tragic cultural clashes. Despite hardships, oppression, and the utter humiliation of slavery, an astonishing musical creativity came to flourish in the creation of work songs and spirituals in the midst of the most diligent and gruesome laboring on the Southern cotton fields. When America’s black population finally was given their basic constitutional rights in 1865, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, the musical culture generated by the African-American slaves constituted a vital musical benchmark and foundation that inextricably would come to impact, shape and mold all future musical excursion within the United States, explicitly or inexplicit.

       After the abolition of slavery, many blacks, however, found themselves to be forced to stay with their former masters, primarily due to labor discrimination, poverty and, later on, the imposition of the Jim Crow laws. Nonetheless, despite various obstacles, the great migration northward started gaining immediate momentum after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and was only to increase in numbers during the following decades. Since Chicago was able to offer both jobs, better salaries and an expanding ‘black community’, it did not take very long until the city established itself as a primary destination for many African-Americans with the desire to migrate north. Between 1916 and 1920, more than 50,000 blacks moved to Chicago’s South Side and the number was not about to decrease, rather the opposite. As in so many other times before in American history, the migrating black population was forced to settle in more or less designated areas made available to them, i.e.: in the least attractive areas of the cities where they would not risk intruding onto the turf of other ethnical groups. In the case of Chicago, it was the city’s South Side that, during the centuries around The Great War and the W.W.II, came to be the center of the ‘black community’ and its expansive culture.

       A vast majority of the new black Chicago inhabitants had grown up in the rural South, working primarily on the Southern cotton fields. When arriving in Chicago, most blacks were compelled to live in overpopulated black ghettos on the city’s South Side, that to a large extent still exists even today, and that offered a life far different from the one they had left behind. Scarce financial resources and housing space, fierce snowstorms, political corruption, the anonymity of the big city, in combination with Chicago’s hard laboring, constituted constant challenges and an ever-ending struggle for survival. Nonetheless, despite the hardships and the tribulations, one could not deny that life in the north made most blacks better off. The constant feeling of fear, impotence, and humiliation, that characterized and permeated life in the South, did not exist in the same way, and instead it had been replaced by real jobs in exchange for decent wages. Naturally, one could of course encounter the various faces of racism in Chicago, as in most other cities in America, but it was not as obvious and explicit as in the South, where Klan lynching and rallies had evolved into almost a daily ritual during the 1920s and 30s.

Many poor black families were compelled to live in worn out and inadequate housing projects such as the Ida B. Wells Housing Project pictured above (Chicago 1941). (photo: Blues Online)

       As Chicago’s black population grew and expanded, most parts of the Chicago’s South and West Sides thus came to be dominated by African-Americans and the black culture. As a consequence, other ethnical groups were indirectly pushed aside, while many chose to relocate in order not to risk the city’s rigid, racial mix-up.

       Chicago’s South Side thus came to foster an expansive and rich black culture, and as a consequence, a virtual cultural explosion came to take place in its wake, generating numerous of nightclubs, theaters, and churches in which music flourished during the decades following the Great War. Charismatic and vibrating Baptist, Pentecostal and Holiness congregations were situated next to highly-frequented and ‘sinful’ bars and nightclubs, but together they added their unique contribution in terms of creating and fostering a vivid musical legacy. Of especial importance for Chicago’s music scene was the so called Maxwell Street Market, located at the corner of Maxwell and Halsted on Chicago’s near South Side. During the time of the Great Migration, it came to serve as a diverse musical oasis and social center for black newcomers. Numerous amounts of newly arrived musicians from the rural South gathered at Maxwell, bringing their guitars and harmonicas in order to socialize and meet fellow musicians and, of course: to jam. After a hard day’s labor in the steel mill, slaughterhouses or in the factories, loads of blacks met in the general confusion amid various stores, bars and restaurants that characterized Chicago’s legendary Maxwell Street Market. The Market was in many ways a replica of life in the South and offered some of the comforts of their former lifestyles. It was a place where you socialized and listened to some good music before heading home for the night. At this point in time, the Maxwell Street Market, and all its corners and open spaces, were thus completely permeated by the ringing and inspiring sounds of blues and jazz bands, and from the sounds of charismatic sermons delivered by preachers preaching ‘the word’. Consequently, it was merely not an accident that several scenes from the John Landis movie, ‘the Blues Brothers’, from 1980 were shot on location at the Maxwell Street Market. Today, very little still exists of the Maxwell Street Market and its original buildings. The owner of the land, the University of Illinois at Chicago, has during the past decade systematically and efficiently demolished most of the old classical buildings in order to make way for their expanding campus.

        Nonetheless, the musical culture that was brought in from the South quickly adjusted itself into its new urban environment in Chicago. Ubiquitous churches and various nightclubs, with nightly jazz and blues music, flourished all over the South Side, nourishing the hungry souls of its inhabitants. One can quite easily be of the notion that the churches and the competing nightclubs had very little, if none, in common. However, despite there being a dividing gulf between them in terms of faith, they both constituted excellent platforms for skilled and innovative black musicians in need to exercise their musical desires. Talented and gifted musicians such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Muddy Waters, Thomas A. Dorsey, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong etceteras, thus flourished in Chicago’s prosperous and fertile cultural environment. And this particular pattern repeated itself in most major cities all over the American Midwest and along the American east coast. Thus an enormous floodtide of soulful grooves and inspiring sounds came to sweep across most American big cities which literally came to explode in pure musical energy, following in the wake of the Great Migration. Among them the unanimous capital city was, of course: ‘Sweet Home Chicago’. It was in Chicago all new trends were born and created, it was here all major performers lived, and it was in Chicago everything began before spreading across the nation to New York, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Hollywood, Detroit and other major cities.

       As Chicago’s musical culture thrived and expanded in small, funky blues and jazz clubs and vibrating churches, quite few were yet realizing the full extent of this exceedingly fertile creativity and its musical significance and impact in molding future musical excursions in Chicago. Even fewer had yet come to realize its impact on the musical culture of the world.

       During the years in the aftermath of W.W.II., Chicago’s musical scene was at its absolute prime. Thanks to the efforts of Thomas A. Dorsey and various singers such as Mahalia Jackson, the gospel had, in a most successful way, incorporated and adopted the blues into a mesmerizing and refreshing mix recognized as the ‘gospel-blues’. Gospel music also came to experience vastly and huge commercial successes and thus entered a time period known as the ‘Golden Age of Gospel’, that lasted up until the late 1960s.

       The popularity of the blues also came to experience a rampant ascending during the 1940s. The music form had gone through an utter transformation, from being a predominantly acoustic music form, into adopting the various advantages provided by the emergence of electrified instruments. Consequently, the electrified genre known as ‘Chicago Blues’ emerged and was led by such musicians as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. The ‘Chicago Blues’ came to experience huge popularity during the 1940s and 50s, and as a consequence, it eventually also came to give birth to a very famous musical baby, Rock’n Roll.

       Chicago also managed to make substantial contributions to the evolvement of jazz, and the musical genre, which initially received extensive financial contributions and support from the notorious, but jazz loving Al Capone, flourished during the decades between the Great War and W.W.II. Chicago was, however, forced to give up its title as the US jazz capital when Harlem, New York emerged as a stronger contestant for the title in the 1940s.

       The cultural explosion that occurred on Chicago’s South Side during a few golden decades is, more or less, entirely indebted to the social, cultural and economical factors generated by the Great Migration. By allowing the creation of black ghettos and, consequently, a dense black community situated in specific and designated geographical areas, the city of Chicago came in utter oblivion to foster a rampant and prosperous cultural evolvement on its South Side. These social and political standpoints in combination with the migration of numerous talented musicians such as, Muddy Waters, Thomas A. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, King Oliver etceteras, enabled Chicago to establish itself as the ‘Home of the Blues’, ‘the Cradle of Gospel Music’, and as a vital Mecca for jazz. Thus, Chicago’s South Side came to create a vital musical foundation that virtually made the whole city of Chicago dance and move to the soulful grooves and rhythms of jazz, blues and gospel music.

       Chicago’s musical scene has during the course of time experienced and gone through several changes and various different evolvements but, nonetheless, the city still remains true to its musical roots. Its musical heritage is seemingly deeply and firmly rooted into the soul of the city and, consequently, it is indeed a prevailing characteristic permeating the city’s cultural activities and profile. Even though several of the classic old night spots on Chicago’s South Side are long gone, there still exists an utterly vast supply of blues and jazz clubs in the city. Today, many blues clubs have, however, migrated north to the trendy and upscale near north side where they serve their music to a predominantly white and ‘baseball-cap-filled’ crowd.

       Nonetheless, there still exists several superb blues and jazz spots on the city’s South Side well worthy a visit, such as the legendary blues club Checkerboard Lounge on 43^rd street and the jazz clubs Velvet Lounge and Andy’s. Despite the extra trip it may incur, it is usually worth the effort to get away from the north side and its ‘tourist traps’.

Links

[Chicago Reader Guide to Music]