29 July 2008
Chicago Electric Blues
Mississippi Delta traditions updated for an electric, industrial age
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
A very different urban blues tradition of the postwar era, Chicago electric blues, derived more directly from the Mississippi Delta tradition of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. Chicago was the terminus of the Illinois Central railroad line, which ran up through the Midwest from the Mississippi Delta. Although Chicago’s black neighborhoods were well established before World War II, they grew particularly rapidly during the 1940s, as millions of rural migrants came north in search of employment in the city’s industrial plants, railroad shops, and slaughterhouses. The South Side’s nightclubs were the center of a lively black music scene that rivaled New York’s Harlem and L.A.’s Central Avenue. The musical taste of black Chicagoans, many of them recent migrants from the Deep South, tended toward rougher, grittier styles, closely linked to African-American folk traditions but also reflective of their new, urban orientation.
Chicago electric blues was a response to these demands. It could be argued that the rural blues tradition had almost completely died out as a commercial phenomenon by the time of World War II, as the urbanizing black audience sought out more cosmopolitan forms of entertainment. From this point of view, the mid-1930s recordings of Robert Johnson represent the final flowering of the Delta blues. However, the old Delta blues style didn’t really die out; it emerged in a reinvigorated, electronically amplified form. The career of Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) exemplifies these developments. Waters was “discovered” in the Mississippi Delta by the folk music scholars John and Alan Lomax, who recorded him in the late 1930s for the Library of Congress. In 1943 he moved to Chicago and found work in a paper mill, while continuing to work as a musician at nightclubs and parties. In response to the noisy crowds, and to the demand for dance music, Waters soon switched from the acoustic to the electric guitar (1944) and eventually expanded his group to include a second electric guitar, piano, bass, amplified harmonica, and drum set. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he was the most popular blues musician in Chicago, with a sizeable following among black listeners nationwide.
Like many of the great Mississippi guitarists, Waters was a master of bottleneck slide guitar technique. He used his guitar to create a rock-steady, churning rhythm, interspersed with blues licks, which were counterpoised with his voice in a kind of musical conversation. The electric guitar, which could be used to create dense, buzzing tone colors (by using distortion) and long sustained notes that sounded like screaming or crying (by employing feedback), was the perfect tool for extending the Mississippi blues guitar tradition. Waters’s singing style – rough, growling, moaning, and intensely emotional – was also rooted in the Delta blues. And the songs he sang were based on themes long central to the tradition: on the one hand, loneliness, frustration, and misfortune, and on the other, independence and sexual braggadocio.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
