When the blues first left home and moved from the Delta into the consciousness of America, Memphis was the first stop. After crossing the Mississippi, the route heads straight up Highway 61. Just across the Mississippi line there are roadside signs for Beale Street, made famous in an early blues song by W.C. Handy. Memphis advertises itself as the home of the blues, and I am looking forward to talking late with, if not the Father of the Blues, at least its great uncle.
Joe Savarin, the executive director of the Blues Institute, calls me at the hotel, and we arrange to meet in Handy Park. ”I`ll be the one in the Bermuda shorts with a gray beard,” he says.
At the appointed hour, I arrive at Handy Square, a park on Beale Street built around a statue of W.C. Handy. Beale Street is in the midst of restoration. Developers are trying to make it Bourbon Street North, and there are a few clubs, plus a sort of fast-food barroom with pina coladas and hurricanes on tap. The street is empty and quiet. Savarin is late.
Then in the distance, a figure appears. He is wearing Bermuda shorts, a yellow T-shirt that reads, ”I (H) the Blues,” and jogging shoes. He has a white beard. ”Sorry I`m late,” says Joe Savarin, immediately launching into what sounds like a prepared speech on the history of the blues. ”The blues didn`t start in Mississippi, nosiree. It was right here in Memphis on Beale Street, a fine street with some of the best homes and churches, the finest theaters and best restaurants. Yessir, right here on Beale Street is where
–let`s walk this way, follow me, please–where a great American art form was born.”
Savarin is wrong about Beale Street. W.C. Handy sang about a good-time street with less-than-virtuous women, plenty of whiskey, and a hint of violence. Savarin has been a promoter in Biloxi and Gulfport, with strippers and musicians for clients. He planned outrageous publicity stunts for has-been movie stars. Then he came to Memphis, founded the Blues Institute, started the annual Blues Awards banquet, and now is trying to raise money to buy a defunct theater and make it a permament tourist attraction like the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
He invites me to accompany him to his office for some literature. We walk down Beale, and he begins jingling the keys in his pocket as we approach a small blue-plywood structure. He opens the door, edges around the counter where he sells Cokes to tourists, and gathers up programs and posters. I buy the posters, we shake hands and promise to keep in touch. The Blues Institute, I realize, is the creation of a man with a post-office box and an answering service.
Memphis never was the home of the blues. Memphis is the city where the blues was transformed and made palatable to a white audience. W.C. Handy was a classically trained musician who heard the blues in Mississippi, came back to Memphis, and rewrote the music in a white style that made it popular. Handy`s blues was a variant of Dixieland and ragtime, and much of what was called blues in the early part of the century was really Tin Pan Alley tunes, black music made white and performed on Broadway, in shows like the ”Club Harlem Review,” ”Change Your Luck,” ”Creole Follies,” and ”Darktown Scandals.” In the 1950s, the real blues came to Memphis when performers like Howlin` Wolf and Ike Turner recorded for Sam Phillips` Sun Records. But ultimately Phillips used Elvis Presley to transform the blues into rock `n` roll for white teenagers. It is easy to understand why Memphis was only a way station for the musicians, most of whom packed up and left town for Chicago.
North of Memphis, Highway 51 winds through what looks like an agricultural no-man`s land–a scrub-crop buffer between the Delta and the Midwestern breadbasket. There are Tennessee and Kentucky, then across the Ohio River is Illinois via a rickety old bridge at Cairo. The wheat fields are flat and endless, a golden ocean. A few blacks who migrated north stopped in Cairo, but most kept going until they reached Chicago`s South Side. That`s why there`s no Bloomington Blues, no Kankakee Stomp, no Rantoul Breakdown.
Blues musicians weren`t the only blacks to leave Mississippi, stop for a cup of coffee in Memphis, and head North. After World War I there was a steady migration from the plantations to more lucrative industrial jobs in the North. The Chicago Defender, for years the most influential black newspaper in the country, encouraged the migration with front-page headlines like: ”More positions open than men for them.” The paper contrasted high wages and freedom in Chicago to lynchings, segregation, and indentured servitude in the South.
Nobody said the streets near Lake Michigan were paved with gold, but to a lot of Mississippians laboring under the burden of a sharecropper`s debt and 50-cents-a-day wages, it must have seemed that way. So by 1930, there were more Mississippi natives living and working in Chicago than in any other town outside Mississippi.
As the musicians moved north, they transformed the mellow, acoustical country blues into the sharp, electrical urban music heard in Chicago`s South Side clubs like the Casbah, Kitty`s Corner, and Theresa`s. The Chicago blues provided the musical roots for the English rock bands that toured this country in the 1960s. Virtually unknown middle-aged blues musicians like Howlin` Wolf and Muddy Waters became overnight sensations among white teenagers because they were opening acts for the Rolling Stones. Today, Howlin` Wolf, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed, stalwarts of the first generation of musicians who moved north from Mississippi, are dead. Willie Dixon, the most prolific blues songwriter in the 1940s and 1950s, has moved to California. Koko Taylor and Son Seals, two transplanted Southerners, still dominate the blues in Chicago, but in most of the city`s more-than-30 blues clubs a new generation is playing.
Alligator Records, the company that records the best of America`s contemporary blues, is a green, two-story, 1917 working-class Victorian house at 6249 N. Magnolia Ave. There is no sign outside, and without the address it would be impossible to guess that Chicago`s main blues connection lives inside.
Bruce Iglauer, Alligator`s president and founder, is upstairs in his bedroom office, while his four employees shuttle from their second-floor offices to the living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs. The living room is filled to overflowing with blues books and records. Plastic, rubber, and stuffed alligators are scattered everywhere, and on one wall an alligator leers from a movie poster about reptilian life in New York`s sewers.
Iglauer bounds down the front stairs. He is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt touting a rival record company. He is 37, bearded, slim, bespectacled, and possessed of a full head of black curly hair. A former girlfriend used to call him ”Little Alligator” because he tapped his teeth in time to music as he listened. He is scheduled to meet John Littlejohn, a Chicago slide guitarist who`s leaving on a two-week Scandinavian tour. ”It`s a 45-minute drive to the airport,” Iglauer says, ”and we`ve got 15 minutes to get there.” We hop into his maroon Honda and inch our way through the dense traffic.
Bruce Iglauer is a native of Cincinnati who went to college in Appleton, Wisconsin, got caught up in the folk-music revival, and gradually drifted from Peter, Paul and Mary to Sleepy John Estes and Bukka White. ”I didn`t really know much about the blues until 1966 or `67,” he says as he lights a cigar.
”I was playing in a lot of little jug bands and stuff and I got into the blues by reading liner notes on albums by people like Geoff Muldaur.
”I came to Chicago the year I graduated from college and went to work for Bob Koester and Delmark Records. In 1971 I recorded Hound Dog Taylor and took a three-week leave of absence to promote the record. After that, about half the calls Delmark got were for Hound Dog Taylor bookings. So in June of
`72 Bob (Koester) sat me down and said, `Make up your mind. It`s one thing or another.` He was right, you know. In the beginning, I really didn`t think Alligator was going to be a full-time job.”
Iglauer relights his cigar and shifts into third. ”Most of my audience is white,” he says. ”The label was originally designed to sell records to me. I was my target market–male, reasonably well-educated, middle class, and a `60s-type guy interested in culture outside what I`d grown up knowing. We`ve made some intrusions into the black market, but a black audience is based almost entirely on airplay, and that`s not always easy to come by. To get airplay, you need to spend a lot of promotional money, which I don`t have.”
Traffic is whizzing by now, and Iglauer shifts into fourth. ”I`ve never really directed this business toward hits,” he says, ”so it`s not surprising we`ve never had any. I stay in business by making records that break even at 5,000 copies. And I don`t take anything out of print, ever. See, we make records that are going to sound different. If our records sound old-fashioned now, they`re not going to sound any more old-fashioned in 10 years. The blues changes and evolves very slowly.
”Blues musicians aren`t in the music business. The vast majority of people who play the blues in Chicago have day jobs. They play basically for fun. Look at the people I`m sending to Europe today. Until he had a heart attack not long ago, John Littlejohn ran a garage. Aaron Burton just quit his job as a gardener for the Chicago Park District. And it`s true of other blues musicians, too. Son Seals worked for a while as a country-club chef; Koko Taylor worked as a hotel maid to bankroll her career. Blues musicians can make modest money, but it would be a big deal to be making as much as a middleweight country act.
