Page 75 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2018

and Charlie McCoy, sometimes by way of St. Louis, Memphis,
Indianapolis or other cities.
By 1930, Chicago had more Mississippi-born black residents
(38,356 by census figures) than any other city in the country,
and twice as many as Jackson, Mississippi’s largest city. St. Louis
had a smaller population but an even higher percentage of
Mississippians and was, at one point, America’s most important
center for blues activity, making it an appropriate city to house
the National Blues Museum.
The steady stream of migration to Chicago and other cities
of industry grew into a torrent during the 1940s and ‘50s fueled
by political and technological changes. As the nation geared
up for another war, factories, processing plants and steel mills
needed new masses of workers, prompting the largest exodus
from the South. Labor was still needed in the South to produce
cotton, exempting Muddy Waters, B.B. King and certain other
valued plantation residents from service, but new machinery
began to replace the field hands. At the same time, as black
soldiers returned home from war, the demand for equal rights
and better pay grew. Leaving home was the obvious response
for many. Between 1940 and 1950, an estimated 150,000
African Americans left Mississippi for Chicago.
The new wave of migrants transformed the sound of Chicago
blues, led by Muddy Waters and his band, and promoted by
a new cadre of independent record labels like Chess and Vee-
Jay. While blues was already established in the city, much of it
had developed a smooth, urbane veneer, and many Chicago
sophisticates looked askance at the downhome variety of blues.
The recordings of the ‘30s and early ‘40s often evidenced this,
and the live entertainment that Chicago’s black newspaper, The
Defender, preferred to promote was either lighter fare or more
jazz-oriented. The transplantation of raw, hard-edged blues
from the Delta and other regions of the Deep South by Muddy,
Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Sonny
Boy Williamson II, Jimmy Rogers, Snooky Pryor, Junior Wells and
Chicago’s black newspaper, The Defender, featured Paramount Records’ ad for Ida others, in tune with the tastes of their migrant audiences, would
Cox’s “Chicago Bound Blues (Famous Migration Blues).” Image from The Chicago transform the sound of Chicago blues forever.
Defender, Nov. 10, 1923; ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Paramount folded during the Great Depression, but larger
national record companies brought more talent into the Chicago
studios in the 1930s and early ‘40s. Vocalion, Columbia,
OKeh, Decca and Bluebird released records by blues artists
who sometimes stayed several years or remained permanently
to take advantage of opportunities as laborers and as performers
in nightclubs, taverns, dance halls and theaters of the South
Side, as well on the streets and at the Maxwell Street market.
From Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia came John
Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Memphis Slim, St. Louis Jimmy,
Washboard Sam, Roosevelt Sykes, Casey Bill Weldon, Robert
Nighthawk, Lonnie Johnson, Doctor Clayton and Kokomo Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans moved out the rural
Arnold. From Mississippi came Willie Dixon, Arthur “Big Boy” South to urban destinations in the northern and western states
Crudup, Jazz Gillum, Johnnie Temple, Memphis Minnie, and Joe Image by Aqua Design

Blues Festival Guide 2018 73