Check out the pedigrees on these Chicago Blues Festival headliners: David “Honeyboy” Edwards used to travel the Mississippi Delta with the near-mythical Robert Johnson; Koko Taylor’s biggest hit, “Wang Dang Doodle,” came from the pen of songwriting legend Willie Dixon; Hubert Sumlin played guitar for years with Howlin’ Wolf; Odetta introduced the blues to a ’60s folk-music crowd that included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. “We certainly try to keep it as traditional as possible,” says veteran coordinator Barry Dolins.
So what’s Swamp Dogg doing at the annual four-day festival, which this year takes place June 8-11?
“You hang around long enough, and even if you sing opera, if you’re black you become known as `the old blues guy,’ ” says the veteran singer, in a phone interview from his California home. “I don’t want to be known as the old blues guy — especially since I was never the young blues guy.”
Swamp Dogg, who will appear June 9 with three other songwriters under the name “Sweet Home, Chicago,” is one of several scheduled artists who are only on the fringes of the blues tradition. In that sense, the Chicago Blues Festival is similar to the Chicago Gospel Music Festival, which opens Friday in the same location, Grant Park. The gospel headliner is Jimmy McGriff, whose press biography begins: “They’re always classifying me as a jazz organist, which I am not. I’m more of a blues organ player.”
If Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams were writing his own press bio, it might read like this: “They’re always classifying me as a veteran ’60s soul producer who became an R&B singer. Which I am not. What I really like to do is calypso music.” Williams’ new “The Reinvention of Swamp Dogg” album is calypso, complete with musicians from Trinidad.
“For me to get it heard by the masses, I had to pick something that wasn’t just targeted to a young demographic,” Swamp Dogg says. “And I have an audience — the entire Caribbean and South America.”
Swamp Dogg isn’t the only festival performer who doesn’t fit traditional blues boundaries. Virginia Beach, Va., singer-songwriter Deborah Coleman — who worked as an electrician and nurse before releasing her first album in 1994 — has slowly shifted from pure electric-guitar blues to a pop-rock sound that recalls the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde.
“I was fortunate enough to have some people who were willing to let me try what I really like doing — which is everything,” says Coleman, who performs June 8 at the Petrillo Band Shell. “I like all genres of music and I try to meld all those things into the `Deborah Coleman personality.’ This album sort of represents the beginnings of that emergence.”
Jimmy McGriff, the blues-and-jazz organist headlining the gospel festival, underwent the same sort of emergence decades ago. After taking private lessons from the great jazz-and-soul organists Jimmy Smith and Richard “Groove” Holmes in the ’50s and ’60s, McGriff began giving the Hammond B-3 treatment to standards like “Georgia on My Mind,” Ray Charles’ “I’ve Got a Woman” and, later, “Gospel Time.”
“I’ll get out there and play something and get off the stage and somebody says, `Did you play a little gospel in that?’ I’ll say, `Everything I play is a little gospel,’ ” he says in a phone interview. “Gospel music is a feeling that you can’t describe. You have to be there to hear it and feel it. I notice if I play a little gospel in the song, it gets to the crowd better than just playing it straight out. Where the jazz and blues comes from is out of the gospel. That’s where it all started.”
