Jazz: The Blues Is How It Is

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Swaying to the drums' rocking beat, a lithe young Negro named Junior Wells closes his eyes and pierces the nightclub's smoke and din with his rough-edged, throbbing baritone:

You say it hurts you, you 'bout to lose your mind,

Lord, I can't stand to see my baby go,

When things go wrong, so wrong with you, it hurts me too.

He cups his harmonica against the microphone and sends a wild, keening cluster of notes soaring over the surging rhythms like gulls over an angry sea. Crammed around tables in front of the bandstand, the listeners—mostly working-class Negroes, down-and-outers and hustlers—stomp their feet, and shimmy in their seats. "Tell it, boy!" they shout. "That's how it is."

That's how it is with the blues at Theresa's, a basement bistro deep in the Negro ghetto of Chicago's South Side. On good nights, the scene is lowdown and swinging, too, a few blocks away at Pepper's or Turner's Blue Lounge, or out on the West Side at Smoot's or Silvio's. Indeed, such a wealth and variety of authentic blues abounds in Chicago today that Musicologist Samuel Charters says: "It's the last place left in the country where a living music is still played in local bars and neighborhood clubs. It's what New Orleans used to be like in the '30s, what Memphis was like in the '20s."

Hark, the Harp. Chicago owes its blues eminence largely to an accident of geography. Practically alone among Northern cities, it has absorbed a steady stream of migrant Negroes from Mississippi, where a fertile folk tradition of spirituals, ballads, work songs and field hollers nourishes the blues the way the rich soil of the Delta sprouts cotton. The result is that all the Chicago blues are shot through with the raw purity of emotion, the lyricism and rhythmic subtlety of the Mississippi country style. Now a whole generation of younger performers have added technical polish and a hard driving sound that reflects the pace and pressures of city life.

Typical of the new bluesmen is Mississippi-born Junior Wells, 31, who was raised in Memphis and moved to Chicago when he was twelve. As he tells it, his musical career was launched when he was arrested for stealing a $2 "harp" (harmonica) that a pawnbroker refused to sell him for $1.50; the judge listened to a sample of his playing, then gave the pawnbroker the other 50¢ and dismissed the case. Blues, says Junior, "gets in my whole body, my whole soul. It knocks me out. It kills me. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't be." The excitement of his performances may not fully justify his description of himself as "Mr. Blues," but it is more than enough to place him in the forefront of the scene. Among other standouts:

>Howlin' Wolf, 56, is the chief exponent of "dirty downhome" country blues. "The Wolf" rarely stirs his hulking, 6-ft. 3-in., 250-lb. frame from a rickety wooden chair in front of his band; but standing or sitting, he movingly shouts the dilemma of the country man who is restless in the urban maze:

When you get back to Chicago,

Want you to look for me in the heart

of town;

If I'm not in the heart of town, I'm on

Lake Michigan side.