I entered the shiny, metallic UFO with trepidation and was trapped between the Roman catacombs and a dark, space-age cathedral. This is not science fiction. It was, rather, my visit to Paul Allen's rock-history museum, the Experience Music Project, in order to preview "Sweet Home Chicago: Big City Blues 1946-66." The show, which opened Sept. 27, is the first museum exhibit of its kind devoted to this subject.
Elegantly produced by EMP curator Jim Fricke, "Sweet Home Chicago" tracks the blues style from its American South roots to cities worldwide, focusing on a 20-year period considered the blues' golden age.
Why the blues? The blues are a major force behind today's popular music, explained Fricke. "The blues are like a big battery that rock and roll goes back to for a charge," he said. (He believes it was the Rolling Stones who first used this image.)
The blues began in the South with African Americans, Fricke said, "as a primal form of music, a direct emotional expression. The blues hadn't the sophisticated resources of, for example, classical musicians. The blues are, essentially, one person playing guitar and singing their heart out."
"Sweet Home Chicago" brings to life the soulfulness and struggle of blues musicians and their milieu. Handsome wood cases display items such as Eric Clapton's smooth, brown and white electric guitar with red strap and his colorfully embroidered red shirt. The veneer of Muddy Waters' electric guitar is like burgundy velvet. One musician's sweater needs darning, but Howlin' Wolf's white tuxedo is ready to go on stage.
Visitors are drawn into the momentum of migrations from America's South to Chicago, and the ways the blues percolated from there to cities and backwaters around the country and the world. Step by step, photos, displays, videos, music and stories told by those who lived the tale enliven the blues journey.
Plaques, bordering a big, horizontal map that fills the middle of the room, mark phases of the migrations. Pick up a phone, press a button and hear Muddy Waters tell how he went north when his employer refused to pay him the 25 cents a white person got for the same job. Press another button and boll weevils crawl over the South, like those that wiped out crops in the early 1900s, forcing a northward push. This map is a trip all on its own; one viewer pressed and re-pressed a button as lines darted out again and again, tracing one blues migration route.
The two big migrations followed each of the two world wars, said Fricke. Over the years, the popularity of the blues waxed and waned. Then the 1948 success of the Muddy Waters recording "Can't Be Satisfied" proved there was a market for the sound, and big record labels stepped in.
In the 1950s, a new generation of blues musicians gravitated to Chicago's South Side. During the folk revival, Pete Seeger saw the blues as part of American folk tradition. Suddenly performers such as Muddy Waters became hippie icons; on one wall, a riveting red and green design partially veils his features. It must have been quite an experience, Fricke commented, for a singer like Muddy Waters to see his face on psychedelic posters.
In that same era, blues musicians were lionized in Europe. "A performer might jump on a plane," Fricke said, "go to Europe, be treated like royalty, then jump on another plane back to the ghetto."
Blues musicians influenced European groups - the Stones, for one big instance. But today the blues are lost among their own offspring, hip-hop and rock.
To rekindle interest, Robert Santelli, EMP director and CEO, was among those who persuaded Congress to declare 2003 the Year of the Blues. At Radio City Music Hall last February, blues legends on the order of Buddy Guy and B. B. King joined other musicians in the EMP-sponsored "Salute to the Blues." "Sweet Home Chicago" continues the celebration.
What exactly do the blues offer the 21st century, I wondered as I previewed the exhibit. The answer is as old as human history. A stringed instrument and a singer are a lyrical outcry going back thousands of years.
In September 2001, when we relearned that there are times a country must face great loss together, many of us turned to music, and our mastersingers came to us. For all of us still living, and for those climbing the Twin Tower steps to heaven, they sang their hearts out.
Rather than being beaten down by the powers-that-be, human beings pick up their dignity and sing out the value of struggle and longing, heartache and love.
Ina Gilles, a freelance writer, lives on Queen Anne Hill. She can be reached through qanews@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
