The Blues Is How It Is

Swaying to the drums' rocking beat, a lithe young Negro named Junior Wells closes his eyes and pierces the nightclub's smoke and din with his rough-edged, throbbing baritone:

You say it hurts you, you 'bout to lose your mind,

Lord, I can't stand to see my baby go,

When things go wrong, so wrong with you, it hurts me too.

He cups his harmonica against the microphone and sends a wild, keening cluster of notes soaring over the surging rhythms like gulls over an angry sea. Crammed around tables in front of the bandstand, the listeners--mostly working-class Negroes, down-and-outers and hustlers--stomp their feet, and shimmy in their seats. "Tell it, boy!" they shout. "That's how it is."

That's how it is with the blues at Theresa's, a basement bistro deep in the Negro ghetto of Chicago's South Side. On good nights, the scene is lowdown and swinging, too, a few blocks away at Pepper's or Turner's Blue Lounge, or out on the West Side at Smoot's or Silvio's. Indeed, such a wealth and variety of authentic blues abounds in Chicago today that Musicologist Samuel Charters says: "It's the last place left in the country where a living music is still played in local bars and neighborhood clubs. It's what New Orleans used to be like in the '30s, what Memphis was like in the '20s."

Hark, the Harp. Chicago owes its blues eminence largely to an accident of geography. Practically alone among Northern cities, it has absorbed a steady stream of migrant Negroes from Mississippi, where a fertile folk tradition of spirituals, ballads, work songs and field hollers nourishes the blues the way the rich soil of the Delta sprouts cotton. The result is that all the Chicago blues are shot through with the raw purity of emotion, the lyricism and rhythmic subtlety of the Mississippi country style. Now a whole generation of younger performers have added technical polish and a hard driving sound that reflects the pace and pressures of city life.

Typical of the new bluesmen is Mississippi-born Junior Wells, 31, who was raised in Memphis and moved to Chicago when he was twelve. As he tells it, his musical career was launched when he was arrested for stealing a $2 "harp" (harmonica) that a pawnbroker refused to sell him for $1.50; the judge listened to a sample of his playing, then gave the pawnbroker the other 50-c- and dismissed the case. Blues, says Junior, "gets in my whole body, my whole soul. It knocks me out. It kills me. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't be." The excitement of his performances may not fully justify his description of himself as "Mr. Blues," but it is more than enough to place him in the forefront of the scene. Among other standouts:

>Howlin' Wolf, 56, is the chief exponent of "dirty downhome" country blues. "The Wolf" rarely stirs his hulking, 6-ft. 3-in., 250-lb. frame from a rickety wooden chair in front of his band; but standing or sitting, he movingly shouts the dilemma of the country man who is restless in the urban maze:

When you get back to Chicago,

Want you to look for me in the heart

of town;

If I'm not in the heart of town, I'm on

Lake Michigan side.

>Otis Rush, 32, another Mississippian, is the smoothest of the new city stylists. He eschews the leaping and gyrating that other bluesmen indulge in because "anybody can jive around like that." Instead, he takes the "more soulful" approach by standing stock-still and concentrating on his inventive, left-handed guitar playing. His voice is lighter and cleaner-textured than those of most blues singers, but when it swoops and curls around a blues line, it carries an electrifying current of feeling.

>Buddy Guy, 29, can be a compelling singer but prefers to let his guitar do the singing for him, from deep moans and explosive shouts to squeals of delight. As a teen-ager in Baton Rouge, he made his own guitar with wires pulled from a window screen, now plays lead in Junior Wells's group. Though he never practices ("My wife won't let me play at home"), he ranks as one of the finest blues instrumentalists in the U.S.

The blues created by these men--and by dozens of others, such as Jimmy Cotton, Otis Spann, Big Walter Horton, Johnny Shines and Homesick James Williamson--inevitably touch on everyday matters of Chicago ghetto life. Sometimes the lyric is as topical as a newspaper headline, as in Junior Wells's Vietcong Blues, about his brother in Viet Nam ("You know they say you don't have no reason to fight, baby,/ But Lord, Lord, you think you're right"). But social comment is only a faint note in the sound of Chicago blues. For the most part, the bluesmen rework the traditional twelve-bar songs that have three-line verses dealing with common troubles, travels, cars, relief checks, jails, loneliness or joys. Above all, they sing about the vagaries of physical love, since, as Junior Wells puts it, "a woman is the biggest damn trouble you could ever have."

Burning Sincerity. Whatever the theme or style, the essence of the blues is a quality of burning sincerity called "soul." "Soul is something that you feel within yourself and you gotta give to the people," explains Singer-Guitarist Magic Sam. "It's hardship, what you've been through. I love it even though it makes me sad, because that's what I am." Adds retired Harmonica Player Shaky Jake: "Blues are the true story, the truest music I ever heard in my life."

Because "soul" expresses the special experiences of Negroes, the blues have remained distinctly their music, a proud but not intransigent symbol of their separateness. Lately, however, a sizable white audience has awakened to the power and beauty of the Chicago ghetto blues.

In Chicago, two new blues clubs on the predominantly white North Side feature not only the likes of Howlin' Wolf and Otis Rush but also a white lawyer's son named Paul Butterfield, who soaked up the Negro style during a five-year apprenticeship in South Side bands. Some blues buffs .are beginning to worry that the art, increasingly cut off from its country roots and diluted by white encroachments, will grow moribund. But the jumping Chicago scene today assures the vitality of the blues for a long time to come. A new vanguard of city-bred youths is already cropping up in the lesser-known bands and outlying clubs, catching the beat, learning the notes, taking up again the ancient, universal plaint:

People, if you hear me humming on

this song both night and day, People, if you hear me humming on

this song both night and day, I'm just a poor boy in trouble, trying to drive the blues away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.