Those who have more than a casual acquaintance with the blues know the music comes in many flavours and variants. Like regional cuisine, the basic ingredients might stay the same, but the spicing changes dependent on which area of the world you taste it in.
From Mail to the Mississippi Delta and India to Indiana and Illinois, the blues assumes the local flavouring that give an area its distinctive bite, yet never loses it's basic nature. While there's no denying the music's southern American roots, you're just as liable these days to find it being played on a mohan vishnu as an electric guitar.
However, there is probably no region outside of the Mississippi where the music has taken deeper roots then the city of Chicago. As the closest major city to the south above the colour line it became the obvious destination of choice for African-Americans seeking a better life as far back as the 19th century. However, it was during the depression of the 1930s, when people desperate for work of any kind left the land and flooded cities across the United States, and the post WW2 industrial boom, that saw the largest waves of migration. That roughly twenty-five year span also saw the development of the sound we know as Chicago blues. A sound that continues to be played today in bars throughout the city by the children, nephews, and grand-children of the men and women who first played it.
In honour of both the originators and their descendants Raisin Music is releasing Chicago Blues A Living History on April 19, 2009. The two CD set offers samples of the sound of Chicago from 1940 to the present, with disc one covering the period 1940 -55 and disc two 1955 onwards. The four featured players on the anthology, Lurrie Bell, Billy Boy Arnold, John Primer, and Billy Branch all have roots deep in the Chicago Blues scene. With Bell and Branch representing today's musicians, Primer considered one of the originators of the electric blues sound of the 1950s, and Arnold's career beginning in 1963, between the four of them they have seen and heard just about all the variations that modern Chicago blues has had to offer.
Of course it's not just these four playing on the disc, as they're accompanied by some of the finest players on the Chicago scene today. Men whose names aren't as familiar to a wide audience as the four leads, but whose faces I've seen pop up on DVDs of gigs recorded in Chicago blues bars over the last four or five years. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're playing "My Little Machine" written in 1940 by John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson or Buddy Guy's "Damn Right I've Got The Blues" from 1991, they sound like they were born playing the music. It's not just the fact that they're skilled musicians, which they are, but they also have the feel and the touch for the music that comes from having lived and breathed it for so long that playing it has become second nature to them.
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