Pig ear sandwiches–a delicacy–go for $2.25, handed out through a window that slides up and down from the side of a steamy little mobile kitchen carved out of the back of an old purple and white panel truck parked for the night at the curb. If you are not from the South, you probably won’t get in line to buy one.
But pig ears sell pretty well because a lot of the South came up north and is living on the West Side now. And that’s what the night is all about: the South–the black South–and the music that was brought to Chicago.
It’s called the blues.
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There are no ads in the newspapers for this place. No posters pasted to walls. No festival flags flying from telephone poles. No listing in any events column. No tickets are sold. There are not even seats to sit in. But there is always a crowd. Has been for at least 15 years.
And it’s all by word of mouth. Street chatter. Curb talk. Like the music itself, it has become a tradition.
“We are preserving the blues right here,” says Cyrus Hayes, a blues musician, who each Friday and Saturday night hauls his equipment and his band over to a vacant lot on the West Side, plugs in two lights, a couple of amplifiers and, at 6 p.m. more or less, starts playing.
Anybody strolling by, waltzing by, driving by, can come. Everybody within a couple of blocks can hear. So people congregate and the entire show is free.
“What you hear here is what we call `hard down blues,’ ” says Hayes, who was born in Little Rock, Ark. “This is blues brought up from the South. Hard down blues is the truth. Like if you lost your man last night, you got to sing about it. Blues comes from the heart.”
They call this blues happening “The Fish Market.” And it has become a tradition in Chicago. It is the one blues place in the city that is out in the open, under the stars, every summer weekend night that it is not raining. It’s in a rough neighborhood that is often staked in crime, but when the blues is playing on those summer evenings, there is no trouble on the corner.
“We don’t really know why, but we don’t get very many calls at the Fish Market when the blues is playing, “says a West Side police officer. “People don’t go there to make trouble, and the trouble-
makers leave the blues people alone.”
The Fish Market is at Kedzie Street where Jackson Boulevard bumps into it. There is the Delta Fish Market there which upon occasion and according to whim is open, but mostly is not. Right next to it is a stage and behind it is an empty lot. The lot goes straight through to Fifth Avenue, which also bumps into Kedzie. There is a small and populated bar with a beer sign out front known as Woods’ Lounge. There is an outdoor stage there too.
This stage is up against a brick wall and the ground around it is uneven and pitted with gravel and broken glass. Nobody seems to mind. The audience generally stands, or leans against cars that have pulled up or against telephone poles. A ladder plopped down on two old tires serves as seats for the more inventive.
“In the blues world, this place is well known,” says Bruce Iglauer, who heads Alligator Records, a Chicago company that records the blues. “Places like the Fish Market capture the South more than anywhere else in Chicago. At the Fish Market people go there as much for the atmosphere as the music.”
“I moved out here to Chicago for the blues,” says Philip Armetta, a white blues guitarist from New York, who was up on stage one Friday night. “There is no blues going on in New York. There are only two clubs in New York City that do blues. One is on 14th Street and the other is called Manny’s Car Wash.
“If you want to understand the blues, you come to Chicago. And you start here at the Fish Market. It’s no snotty club where you have to pay to get in. This is for everyone. The blues is the music of the common man. It’s a shared experience. Neighborhood people get up and sing. Musicians come from all around to sit in. There is no separation between those on stage and those in the audience. If they want to sing, they climb up on stage.”
“I been singing here, I don’t know, about 20 years, maybe,” says Elnora, a robust woman with close-cropped hair who is known as the “Shaky Lady” because of the song she often gets up and does called “Shake.”
Elnora, who was born in Walls, Miss., started singing at 14 in a gospel choir. Her daddy, she says, taught her. He played the harp, or harmonica. In some parts it is referred to as a “Mississippi saxophone.”
“You know, when you got the blues, if you can sing, you don’t have to cry. You sing them out. South, North, don’t matter. Blues is how you feel. It’s just that us people from the South tend to do it.”
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The nights begin slowly at the Fish Market. The crowd collects as the sun dims and twilight settles over the West Side. Somehow the blues takes on a greater meaning when the day is over, a big old full moon leaning down and watching as people begin to relax in the evening cool and move to the music–and the words. Nodding as though they know just exactly what the singer is talking about. They’ve been there.
“Most black blues fans are interested in the words, whether the words tell a story. This isn’t about the playing of the music, it’s about community. It’s about what has happened in their lives,” says Iglauer.
“Lot of these young blacks, they don’t know nothing about blues music, they are into rap. I hate rap. That ain’t music. That’s noise, ” says David Lindsay, a black blues guitarist who was on stage one Saturday night.
Like everyone there gathered, he put on no pretense when he climbed onto the stage. He was wearing a black hat pulled forward, a clanky medallion around his neck; he sported a beard and his shoes had no laces. A large set of keys attached to his belt shook and rattled as he bent up and down over the guitar while he was singing one of his own songs.”Every woman I had, she done me wrong.”
“Now my father, who taught me, he was from Mississippi,” says Lindsay. “I am from Cook County but my father used to play here. His name was Big Bad Ben. He played lead guitar, too.
“One day some young lady came up to me and started telling me her problems and then she told me she doesn’t like this kind of music–the blues.
“And I said, `Well, you lost your man. You got problems. You got the blues.’
“And she said, `I got something.’
“And I said, `Welcome to the blues. What you got is what the blues is all about. Start listening to what the songs are saying.’ ‘Cause if you didn’t have the blues, you wouldn’t know what it is like to be happy.”
`The blues are our roots’
There are blues joints all over Chicago, North Side, West Side and South Side. They all have their own clientele, be they natty young urban black youths dressed to the nines or sandal-footed suburbanites in shorts.
But this, on the West Side, is unique.
“I seen ’em come here from London and I seen ’em come from Maywood,” says Elton Jones, a faithful attendee of this summertime ritual. Himself a native of the South–Waynesboro, Miss.–he says “Southern people understand the blues better than Northern people. That’s why the blues is still on the West Side. ‘Cause there’s so many of us from the South still here. The blues aren’t fancy, but they are our roots.”
“Black radio plays very little blues here in Chicago,” says Iglauer, “so the young urban black population is not growing up with it. Blues is perceived as adult music. Working-class blacks are the blues fans and many of them are from the South.”
“This ain’t no rich man’s crowd,” chuckles an older man as he watches someone on stage holding up a cardboard box and encouraging donations. One, two, maybe five bucks. Mostly ones.
“And ain’t nobody up there wearing real gold, either.” He reaches deep into his pocket and finds a dollar. “I’m going to put a little something in the box while I got it, because tomorrow night I might have nothing. But I’ll still have my ears and they’ll still be singing. Listening is free.”
“I just love the blues,” says a woman named Lilly, who mentions that she comes every night she can. “It tells me something I want to hear and it tells me things I know. I been coming here for years. We got babies here listening to this music. We got mothers bringing little children to listen to the songs. Might not be everybody, but there is always a crowd.
“The blues isn’t going to die. Surely not in the South. And in the North, blues isn’t gonna be gone either. Not as long as you got the West Side.”
