Bruce Iglaur

My knowledge of blues besides coming from records comes from what I learned after I started coming to Chicago in the late nineteen sixties. I lived in Appleton Wisconsin and when I started coming down here it was because I had been reading about blues and I was intrigued, and I came to see Bob Koester. Heâs been recording blues since the late fifties, and he was one of the first guys to record blues on LP, instead of as singles and supposedly his first Junior Wells record was the first record of a working Chicago blues band recorded for an album rather than albums being a collection of recorded singles, or a guy with studio musicians. Heâs made some great records and Bobâs sort of a hero to me. When I started coming down there was no blues on the north side in the white community. Zero.

Now there had been some, there had been this sort of folk-blues period when there had been clubs in the Rush Street area÷Mother Blues and Big Johnâs, where Muddy had played on the north side and Howlinâ Wolf, and also white bands like Paul Butterfieldâs and Charlie Musslewhiteâs and there had been interaction there. There had also been blues bands that just worked in various places, working class bars in the white community. I remember a club called Donâs Cedar Club that was in sort of a Polish neighborhood but had blues bands just because it was fun music to dance to and all their patrons were white and all their artists were black. But almost all the blues was in the ghetto÷of course there are two big ghettos in Chicago, the west side ghetto and the south side ghetto÷and theyâre somewhat separated, the south side ghetto is the older ghetto because when black people started coming here the area where they could rent housing was around thirty-fifth and Indiana. The black community spread out from there, then, to generalize wildly, then in the period of time shortly after World War II, the Jewish neighborhoods on the west side stretching out along west Madison Street, all the way from just west of downtown all the way to the city limits slowly became black neighborhoods as black people were able to live there, because housing was very strictly controlled by real estate interests in this city. And so the younger ghetto, the people who immigrated in the fifties, was off in the west side ghetto. The sounds of the west side and the south side werenât exactly the same, although there were some similarities and there were artists÷like Howlinâ Wolf÷who could work in either place, but there was a whole west side guitar sound that grew up in the fifties which was more modern, less traditional than the south side sounds. But I was visiting clubs in the west side and the south side, real regularly÷you could hear live blues any night of the week in Chicago, and on the weekends I would know of anywhere between thirty and fifty places that would have a live blues band, and there were probably some I didnât know of. All in the ghetto, most of them neighborhood-type of bars. I mean there were some showplace-type of places, big clubs or nightclubs with big stages where a BB King or a Bobby Bland would appear, but I tended to go to the neighborhood clubs which were corner taverns, some with a bandstand some not.

The bands were loose they would have floating personnel, you would see the same bass player in four different bands in the course of two weeks÷only someone like Muddy Waters, who was playing outside of the ghetto, had a really strictly well-defined band. Or Howlinâ Wolf who was still playing in the ghetto, but you would still see him with the same guys almost every week. He switched piano players a lot, but youâd see the same bass player with him for a year or two years.

The music was dance music. People danced to blues, and one of the things thatâs been forgotten in the course of the development of the white audience for blues is that blues music was almost entirely designed for people to dance to. And one of the things youâll see with older blues musicians÷Henry Townsend whoâs an old piano player, almost a hundred years old, from St. Louis was here at the blues festival last year, he plays both piano and guitar and as you can imagine heâs old and his hands donât move as quickly as they used to, and when he played the piano part of his set which was solo, I noticed that his right hand, where he was doing the improvising, was pretty raggedy, he was having a hard time executing what he wanted to, but his left hand, where he was keeping the rhythm going, the rhythm was absolutely on time. Because he knew that his music had been designed for one guy at a piano making people dance, he knew that the beat, and keeping the beat solid was his first job. And if you listen to blues records that were made for black audiences, like Malico does now and like every blues record up until the late nineteen sixties, just about every blues record, youâll hear that regardless of what happened in the soloing aspects of it, that there were always rhythms that people could dance to. And the first job of the blues as far as Iâm concerned, the two jobs of the blues were the rhythm and singing, and with the singing of course the words. And soloing, and the birth of soloing as an important part of blues has been to a great extent÷and obviously I can poke holes in this generalization÷has been a development of white people getting hold of the blues and coming at it from a rock and roll point of view. Which means that, all of a sudden, flashy guitar playing got really important. There were instrumental blues records with flashy guitar playing or flashy harmonica playing or flashy piano playing made for black audiences, but the vast majority of blues records that were hits for black people÷singles, weâre talking singles now, not albums÷were records where the vocals were prominently featured, and records with really well-defined rhythm that was easy to dance to. When you listen to old blues records, you got to remember when you listen to Robert Johnson, people were dancing to Robert Johnson, people were dancing to Son House. And what I donât know and would love to find out, is what steps people were doing. I would love to see how people danced to that music.

Part of what Iâm circling around here is Iâm trying to think about the way blues in those clubs was different from blues on records. Songs lasted, of course, indeterminate amounts of time, but generally they lasted a long time because people were dancing, and you know when people get to dancing they donât want to stop. So nobody worried about how long the song went on. It was very usual that people did familiar songs. There were a lot of reasons for that. One is, just like anywhere else, blues artists playing in blues clubs took requests, and of course requests would be what was on the radio or what was on the jukebox, or what had been on the radio five years ago or ten years ago. Because people would come up to Magic Slim, who I used to see all the time, heâs a wonderful local musician, and request BB King songs that were fifteen years old. And because Magic Slim is a guy who has a huge vocabulary of music, people would request songs they knew. Nobody came up and said, "do a song I donât know." The other reason for that was P.A. systems were almost non-existent, and so typically in these clubs somebody would have a guitar amp with two inputs and in one input theyâd plug the guitar and in the other input theyâd plug some vocal mic. And so very often youâd have your vocals kind of buried in the guitar sounds÷so if the audience could pick out some of the words and they already knew the song from the radio or the jukebox, then they could fill in the blanks. So you didnât have a situation where people were experimenting with a lot of new material÷you might do new arrangements of songs that were known, you know they didnât necessarily do a BB King song exactly like BB King did it, but they did it in such a way that people would recognize the song. And when familiar songs happened, people in the audience would respond, you know, people would holler, people would wave their hands like in church, people would do other things to indicate that they knew the song and the story. Sing along sometimes.

One of the things that happened when Bob Koester started recording blues on albums here in Chicago with Junior Wells and with Magic Sam and with people like that, he was recording bandstand repertoire. And one of the things that youâll hear about a lot of those albums is that the songs on those records are not original songs, or relatively few of them are original songs. They may be reworkings of other peopleâs songs, they may be fairly good copies of other peopleâs songs, because both Junior Wells and Magic Sam had some singles that had been on the radio in the past, sometimes they re-did their own records. But you donât hear a lot of fresh new material. Now, for us who were white listeners in the sixties and early seventies, it was very fresh, because we hadnât been listening to black radio, you know, ten years before that. Though, a song like Sweet Home Chicago, when Magic Sam recorded it in 1967 or 68, which is the one that everyone knows, or that everyone white knows, the one that set the mark, that the blues brothers copied and lots of other people copied, that was a pretty fresh new song to somebody like me, but to Magic Samâs fans, that would have been a song that Junior Parker had had a hit with about five years before on black radio on Duke Records, probably a two-minute version. And the version that Magic Sam did on Delmark was probably four and a half or five minutes because he did it like he did it on the bandstand, and it was an LP, so he didnât have to worry about a good length for the jukebox, which is about two minutes, you know, sing two verses, play a verse, sing another verse, do an ending or a fadeout÷he could play it as long as he felt it. and one of the things that the studio offered was a lot of freedom on albums to stretch out that hadnât been there with singles, and it wasnât just the technical thing, we can only record on a 78 for you know two, two and a half minutes, it was also that radio wanted to have plenty of space for ads, so radio didnât want to play five minute records, they wanted to play two minute records then squeeze in another ad, or give the impression that they were playing a lot of music when they had actually played three songs in five minutes. Some of Little Richardâs early rock and roll records are a minute and a half long, yet theyâre classic tunes.

I know that the difference between myself as a producer and Bob Koester as a producer, at least at the time that I was working for him, was he was at least at the time what we used to call the "four hours and a bucket of beer" school of production. Heâd take a working band, or in some cases, the first Delmark session I went to was a Junior Wells session, and Junior was in charge of getting the band together. And Bob literally didnât know who was going to show up for the session. That doesnât happen at Alligator sessions. He didnât know what songs were going to be recorded, Junior did. There was no rehearsal, unless Junior arranged a rehearsal. It was "come in and do the bandstand thing in the studio." And for the records, some of Juniorâs records and some of Magic Samâs records that could be great. If you had the right chemistry and the right players and the right song choices, wonderful things happen. People could improvise. Other times it could lead to albums full of familiar songs done in familiar ways by guys who werenât that great at playing together, you know, who were earning their money.

I can only speak from the limited experience that I had when I was there, The understanding, I mean it wasnât even said, the understanding was "okay weâre making an album now, you can stretch out as long as you feel it." If you want to play five choruses and theyâre good, play them. Really how long you carry the song is up to you. And since weâre really not thinking about getting hits on the radio or hits on the jukebox, itâs really your call, you the musicianâs call how long the song goes. So youâll hear Magic Sam songs where clearly he was hoping to do a three minute song and get it on the radio, and youâll hear situations where he was just doing the bandstand thing and stretching out. I started recording my first artist, I never told him how long to do the song, but I did say I wanted to keep a bandstand feel, I wanted you to do it like you do it at Florenceâs lounge. To him that meant that he could play it as long as he felt it. And there was undoubtedly conflict in his mind between the way he had always heard records, which was a couple minutes long and the way I was encouraging him to do things, but he was working for me and if that was how I wanted him to do it he was happy to do it because he knew how to do it. It wasnât like he was learning how to do something new, my first records were people doing their bandstand repertoire.

The thing that I did was I spent enough time with the bands that I knew every song they played live, or thought I did, and picked the ones that werenât so familiar. The ones that were originals, or the ones that were less well-known by other people. But it was easier then because the general blues repertoire, you know most of my audience, my white audience, knew twenty-five or thirty blues songs and anything after that was new. So I could get away with taking any Elmore James song except Dust My Broom and The Sky is Crying, which I eventually ended up recording even those, or any B.B. King song except The Thrill is Gone, Why I Sing the Blues, Sweet Sixteen, or maybe one or two others, and they would be fresh to my audience. It was later on that changed. My audience became more sophisticated on songs and I had to encourage my artists, and this is part of what I did as a producer, to either write more or to look deeper at other peopleâs songs÷I would say "I canât record those other people, youâre going to have to find something else." Or eventually, I started bringing songs to my artists and suggesting songs to them. So, when I record somebody like Son Seals, Iâll bring in something like 60 or 70 songs, from writers, or from other records that Iâve heard that are obscure, or Iâll actually solicit songwriters I know to write songs that I can present to him. Thatâs changed a lot. The bandstand repertoire still happens a lot on the bandstand, in fact, one of the things thatâs frustrating to me in Chicago is that I go out and hear blues bands and I hear the same damn songs. Theyâre playing too much for tourist crowds who want to hear Sweet Home Chicago, who want to hear The Thrill is Gone, or think they do.

Itâs my opinion, thereâs nothing to base this on, just my own opinion, that as the long flashy guitar solo has become more important, especially for those people working for white audiences, whether theyâre white or black artists, with the rise of the guitar solo has come the decline of the lyrics and the vocals. And one of the things that true of the vast majority of the records that have sold to black people over the years is that theyâve been by people who can really sing. Voices that can really tell a story. And by "sing" I donât necessarily mean big, wide ranges, though some of them have that, or great technique, but believability. Albert King was not, by most standards, a great singer. He couldnât sing a huge range of notes, he didnât have a particularly loud voice, but boy when he sang you believed every word he sang. And thatâs what sold him. To white people it was about his guitar playing, to black people, it was about those songs and the stories they told, I mean there were exceptions to this of course, but as a generalization. I think that thereâs been a lot less pressure on the bands, certainly in the bandstand situation, to come up with songs that resonate with audiences and more to come up with solos that resonate with audiences.

Albert King wrote very few of those songs that he sang so wonderfully. Most of them were written for him by other people, some of them professional songwriters. And I do think that thereâs less pressure on artists to come up with songs. Very often artists donât come up with songs until theyâre recording.

One of the things that Alligator has become over the number of years that Iâve been recording and the number of albums, about 180 albums now, is kind of a standard in the blues industry and when people talk about the white blues audience they talk about the Alligator audience, when the talk about the black blues audience they talk about the Malico audience. Malico guys and I are pretty friendly, but we recognize the difference in our production values and in what we do. Because theyâre very song-centered and because they have a tendency to record a lot of romantic material and ballads, they tend to smooth off the rough edges, and most of the people that they have on their label had hits on other labels in the 50s, 60s and 70s like Bobby Bland, Johnny Taylor, Little Milton, Denise LaSalle, theyâve only been able to break a couple of artists. But itâs definitely a very song and not a very solo-centered kind of a sound at Malico. Also lots of production÷strings, background singers, horns÷pretty slick by my standards. Also my production is pretty raw, though somebody at Fat Possum would say it isnât raw enough. Their production standards are really raw.

You know, Iâve certainly been guilty of encouraging people to show off on their guitars, harmonicas or pianos or whatever. I think audiences respond to flash, and I think that having emotional peaks in the music is a good idea. Some people would say that I encourage my artists to rock out too much, and that Iâm not true enough to the tradition. I like to think that I encourage the artists to do what they do. Either to take what they are and enhance it, or focus it. Another think I guess Iâd say is that over the years, the studio has gone from a place where music is recorded to a place where, to some extent, music is created. And I donât just mean that arrangements happen in the studio, or things get changed around. I mean when Robert Johnson came in to record we assume that the only instruction that the producer gave him is "Hereâs where you aim your guitar, hereâs where you aim your voice, and when that red light goes on youâve got however many seconds to end the song." And certainly on a lot of those old records, and Iâm not picking on Robert Johnson, you can hear people who either are clearly cutting a song a little short or adding a few extra bars to try to stretch out to the end of the length. Where the song was done but the recording wasnât done, so they had to do something, so they quickly filled in something. Tommy Johnson is one of my favorite Delta artists and I hear on some of his records that there is an extra eight bars of guitar tacked on the end because he realized he had to fill up some time and he had gotten through all the words singing that he had planned to sing.

With the advent of greater studio technology which really started in the 50s, like if you listen to Sun Label Records recorded in Memphis, whether theyâre blues records or theyâre rock and roll records youâll hear whatâs called the famous Sun slap echo. Youâll hear it a lot on early Elvis records where youâll hear words being repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated. But youâll hear it on Junior Parker and Howlinâ Wolf records too, you know, theyâre blues records that they recorded at the same studio. Thatâs something you do technically in the studio with a second tape recorder. Itâs called slap back because it kind of slaps back at you. You actually feed the vocal onto another tape recorder thatâs moving, and you put it onto the record heads obviously already recorded, and thereâs a little distance between the record heads and the playback heads. So if you record it and simultaneously play it back, itâs being recorded and moments later, itâs being played back, and you add that sound in. And by speeding up or slowing down the recorder, you can have the voice come back more quickly or more slowly. Now you can do that digitally in the studio and have somewhat the same effect, although some of us like tape slap, meaning we would add them on tape because itâs a slightly different feel. That was a technical thing to try to make the record sound more exciting, to make it sound more exciting on the radio.

A lot of early Chess records youâll hear are very heavily compressed. Which means that they adjust the way itâs being recorded, and mixed÷but in this case they were mixing as they went÷so that the softest sections arenât very soft. So you get your loud part and your louder part, but you donât have your really soft part. Now, every record made is compressed, because the complexity of the human voice is so great, that if you donât do compression, voices would be lost in the instruments when they got quieter. Symphony records are very compressed because they have to be, because symphonic music has such a broad dynamic that the quiet parts would be lost. So a lot of singles were very compressed so theyâd sound more exciting and jump out of the radio or jump out of the jukebox. Radio stations compress things also, to make their station appear to be louder when youâre scanning for a station. And youâll hear Chess records where the vocals were recorded so loudly and on bad equipment that it recorded into distortion. Youâll actually hear the distortion on some of the records. Well, that was to make things sound more exciting. And a lot of us who like old blues records kind of enjoy that distortion, even though I donât record into distortion. Because thereâs some excitement to it, it sounds like the guyâs right up there on the mic, screaming into your ear. And the human ear can distort too. I like distortion coming out of guitar amplifiers, and one of the things I always do with musicians is I encourage them to play as loud in the studio as they do on the bandstand, because usually theyâll play with some distortion. And now of course, distortion has become more a regular part of guitar sounds. It was typical in the studio in the old days, when high volume levels were harder to handle technically, or when there wasnât much isolation, to encourage people to turn down, which cleaned up their sound. Where in the clubs, where they had no PA systems except for the vocals, they tended to play pretty loud and on small amps. Because small amps were all there were, and if you wanted to fill the club with music one of the ways you did it was you cranked up your amp until it distorted. The first guy I recorded wouldnât have thought of playing without a lot of distortion. he turned his guitar up all the way, he turned his amp up all the way. He got to like that sound, and a lot of the sound isnât purely the music tone, itâs the fuzziness around the sound. Not everybody plays with that sound, but it was right for him.

So the studio was being used technically to enhance the sounds as early as the early fifties. Youâll hear Muddy Watersâ records being distorted, South Side people, youâll hear Elmore James being distorted÷distortion was being used, what happened with the west side guitar sound was more that guitar strings got lighter, thinner, and they were easier to bend. So starting really with T-Bone Walker in the thirties but really with B.B. King and his generation of guitar players, who instead of using a slide tube to make microtonal movements, or literally walking up the neck, will bend up the neck. theyâll take a note thatâs flat from what they want to reach and to create excitement bend up to the note. And the west side guitar players were more in that sense modern guitar players, post-B. B. King guitar players. And when we talk about the west side we talk about Magic Sam, Freddy King, and Otis Rush. They were really the key stylists of the west side. And Buddy Guy, when he first came to Chicago, was a west side player although he became a south side player. And you get what you think of as modern blues guitar coming out of the west side. And to some extent the lessening popularity of slide players, which were really popular in the Delta partly because you could move pitches which you couldnât move by bending those really heavy old black diamond strings on guitars with really high action. So this is the style that became the way blues guitar is thought of these days.

The other thing that happened with the other styles, the south side styles and the delta styles, is typically, since there was no Fender bass, Fender basses didnât show up until the mid-fifties, upright basses werenât around much because they were expensive instruments so you either had a washtub, or people took regular guitar strings, lowered the pitches of them, and played the basslines on guitars. So it would be normal in an early Muddy Waters band to have Muddy playing the lead guitar on slide and Jimmy Rogers playing the bass parts on guitar, and no bass player. So when youâre playing bass parts on guitar, youâre not bending the strings. You want specific pitches, you donât want to bend up to them. I mean, bass players do a little bit of bending, but itâs not an important part to them. And then you have guys who play what I think of as pattern rhythms, which means you play rhythmic figures within the chords. But youâre not doing a lot of bending, so you tend to play a lot of triple figures, like the kind of things Eddie Taylor played on Jimmy Reed records. Often itâs things like the guitar player is playing things like 1, 2, 3 . . . 1, 2, 3 . . . 1,2,3 because the three against the four is a typical blues thing, and now Iâm getting too technical.

If youâll listen to the drumming on a slower blues record, typically youâll hear the bass drum playing the one and the three or one two three four. Youâll hear the snare drum always, virtually always, playing the two and the four. Then we have one more thing to bring in here, the high hat. Itâs normal for the high hat to be playing the three at the same time the bass drum is playing the four. And if you do it fast, you get a shuffle, because you canât play the triplets that fast. And the three against the four is in my opinion, and I didnât make this up, I stole it from some other people, particularly Tom Dowd, a famous producer. The three against the four is part of the essence of traditional black rhythms in general. And then you could make that the six/eight also. Itâs not unusual in blues songs, in slow blues songs on the way out, like if you were doing an out-chorus, for the drummer to create excitement by going from a four/four to a six/eight. Which means that heâs doubling up his rhythms. Youâre not speeding up the song, youâre doubling up beats within the time. This goes back a long way, like if you listen to Big Joe Williamsâ country blues records, one of his favorite tricks, because he loved to throw off guitar players who were trying to accompany him, was doubling up the time within the verse. It was like a, "take that! You canât keep up with this." My guess is that somebody in the Delta knew that that was a cue for changing your dance step. And when you were dancing in the dust outside Big Joe Williamsâ shack in Crawford, Mississippi, people went, "Aha! I know what to do now," and went to dancing like this you know, "thought you could fool me, Joe, but I got it." But Iâve never seen that done, Iâve never seen people dance to Skip James or Tommy Johnson, and I want to know what they did. Thatâs really important to me.

When you went to clubs in the west side you would see quite a few less harmonica players than you would see on the south side. Harmonica was more traditional. When guitar became the predominant instrument of blues in the fifties, harmonica got shoved out, as did piano. At the turn of the century, even poor and lower middle class homes had pianos, pianos were everywhere. People made their own music, but the main instrument that people would make their music on would be pianos. Youâd see pianos and c-melody saxophones, because a c-melody saxophone you could play to the same sheet music you would play on a piano. So piano was a very important part of the blues from its beginnings up until the mid-fifties, but pianos werenât portable, and they werenât loud. When music got loud and amplified, harmonicas could be amplified, but when guitars got screamingly loud, harmonicas kind of fell by the wayside too. It was in the fifties, in a lot of the places on the west side of Chicago that the guitar became the instrument of the blues.

The introduction of blues to white people happened rurally, in the south, kind of all the time, especially in the southeast, like in the Carolinas, Georgia, where there werenât the vast plantations. There was sharecropping, but done on smaller farms. There was more interaction between black people and white people. And the plantations on the Delta, and you know the Delta only became an agricultural center after the turn of the century, before that it was swamps, it had to be drained, and plenty of black people died in that process, but if you talk to, well, you canât now, but Bill Monroe, the white guy who was declared to be the inventor of bluegrass music, he talked about how in his youth he listened to primarily black musicians in Kentucky. People he described as blues musicians. Jimmy Rogers, the father of country music, talked about learning from black musicians in his youth, which would have been . . . I donât know, 1900, 1910? And he in fact had the balls to record, after he got famous, with Earl Hines on piano and Louis Armstrong on trumpet. And he was a country music star, back when country music was all acoustic. Weâre talking in the thirties, The Singing Brakeman, who was a huge star in 1931-32, talked about his interaction with black musicians. There are black musicians whoâve talked about learning things from white musicians, mostly from country players. And Bobby Bland is the worldâs biggest Frank Sinatra fan. Frank Sinatra loved a bunch of black singers. So the interaction on the street level, or maybe I should say on the farm level, happened way early. Elvis Presley hung around Beale Street in 1952-53 watching black musicians sing for black audiences, and sang in some black clubs. Most of the black blues musicians I know who are older have some recollection of working for mostly white audiences at various early times in their careers. And then there are hilarious stories like Lonnie Brooks, who records for me, started his career under the name of Guitar Junior in Port Arthur Texas, and his first record was a single called "Family Rules." It was this sound that they call swamp pop that combines blues and country sounds, and nobody knew he was black. Most of the shows he was booked on were country shows, and when he showed up, most of the country audiences were, letâs say, surprised.

So there was interaction early on. If you look at the roots of rock n roll, like Elvis, youâre looking at hillbilly musicians, who were extremely influenced by black records and by seeing black artists. In fact a lot of Elvisâ stage show was borrowed from Roy Brown, you know, the explicitly sexual moves, the pelvis thrusts, were something that black artists were doing because they could get away with it, you know, they were allowed. So I donât think you can draw a line and say that there was this moment that this happened. For a lot of people my age, and Iâm fifty-one, what happened was that in the early sixties there was this big revival of American folk music and acoustic music, it was sort of the anti-rock and roll forces. And I donât mean rock and roll that was derived from black music, I mean this kind of throw-away music, simple music that was kind of disposable÷this was serious music, with socially responsible lyrics, with choruses you could sing along. And I was part of that, I had my acoustic guitars and I strummed along and sang badly out of tune. And what happened at that time, was in looking back at older American music a lot of white people found things out about blues and listened to a lot of blues records that had been reissued on LPs. Then people like Dick Waterman went down south and found that a lot of these musicians who had made these records were still alive, and they were brought forward at things like the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, which is extremely important÷the first live blues I saw was Josh White at a folk festival in 1963. The next live blues I saw was at University of Chicago folk festival. Bob Dylan listened to a lot of blues, so the sixties was a time when there was interest in acoustic blues by a lot of white people, and then, starting around 1965, there began to be white people performing Chicago-style blues. And Paul Butterfield, who is an extremely important musician, harmonica player from here, for a brief period of time because he was on a popular folk music label, blues artists who were recording acoustic were on folk labels like Vanguard, but the electric guys like Muddy Waters were still in the province of black audiences only. And Paul Butterfield was a very important musician for bringing the sounds of Chicago-style blues, amplified harmonica and B.B. King-style guitar to white audiences. And I came in to this through the folk end of it, but the Butterfield Band made a huge impression on me, and made me look at what the whole tradition was. It got me excited, I heard the words "Chicago blues" and I wanted to know more. And between my first Paul Butterfield album and my first Muddy Waters album was probably no more than two months.

The way I see it, is that in order for blues to get international fame, it had to become popular with white people because white people control media. And blues became more credible with white people as the sixties passed. When Elvis Presley imitated black artists, there wasnât a consciousness on the part of the audience that he was doing something, well there was a consciousness on a part of the southern white audience that he was doing something that seemed pretty black. And he was condemned actually for trying to imitate black musicians. The northern audience÷I remember when I was seven and Elvis Presley broke nationally I didnât think he was doing a black thing because I didnât know what black music sounded like. I just knew it sounded different and wild and energetic and fun, and that it didnât sound stodgy like my parentsâ music did. So there was no consciousness on my part that this was a black music form. It wasnât until the middle of the sixties that I became aware that there was a sort of a black music at all, because I was living in a place with almost all white people. There was much less interaction, in general, between white cultures and black cultures, than there is now. The thought that the majority of the audience buying rap records would be white, which is supposed to be the case, would have been unthinkable in 1955. I mean somebody like Little Richard could cross over and sell records to white people, and be this wild black guy, but the vast majority of records made by black artists were sold to black people. And the majority of Alligator records are sold to white people even though I have some white artists most of my artists are black artist and originally all were black artists. And almost from day one my audience has been white because Iâve gone to the rawer side and because Iâve gone to rock and roll radio because black radio, what they call urban contemporary now even if itâs in Yazoo, Mississippi, represents only about ten percent of the radio in the United States. So, youâve got many less stations in any one market to hit on for radio play, and itâs traditionally a very hit-driven form of radio. You rarely hear a black-oriented station that will play a lot of album tracks, itâs about singles. You know, I canât get on white top forty radio and I canât get on black top forty radio, I need people who want to go deep into an album and play a variety of music for their listeners. Iâve always been very frustrated with black radio. Malicoâs been brilliant at getting on black radio, but mostly in the south. But mostly with artists who are already established. I donât know what theyâre going to do when Bobby Bland, Denise LaSalle, or Little Milton either die or are too old to tour. I donât know how theyâre going to develop their next generation of artists. But what they tell me at Malico, is "we donât make blues records, we make adult black records, and in ten years weâll be recording people like Mase, weâll be recording people who were popular in the seventies. and who canât sell to younger blacks now, but who can sell to the people who liked them when they were young." And I have to say I wonder if black couples now who like rap are going to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary by throwing another log on the fire and putting on that good old Public Enemy record. And I pretty much doubt it, because people÷not all rap is angry of course÷but people tend to like more romantic music as they get older.

Koko Taylor is somebody who came north with the guy she eventually married, they came on a greyhound bus with, she said, twenty-five cents and a box of Ritz crackers. He got a job the first day that he got off the bus, he got a job I think at a steel mill, he worked at a steel mill and drove a cab, and she cleaned houses. She cleaned houses for rich white people, and that was so much the story of Chicago. They said, "if you canât get a job in Chicago, you canât get a job." I mean itâs not true anymore, but somebody like Andrew Brown, who Dick Shurman will tell you about, Andrew came north and got a job in a steel mill being a lifter. A lifter is exactly what it sounds like. If theyâve got a piece of steel thatâs too small for the forklift, a hundred-pound piece of steel, theyâll just call the big strong guy. The lifter is the strong guy. Andrew came with no education from the south, and he got this job, and before he died he had bought a little house in an almost all-black suburb, Harvey, IL, and owned two cars. That was what could happen in Chicago. And that was why he came here. Now of course, the steel mills are gone, all those Iâll-work-as-hard-as-I-need-to-to-make-my-way-for-my-family jobs are gone, they donât exist anymore. You know, youâve got to come with a skill. It didnât matter to Andrew Brown that the public schools sucked, I mean first of all he was out of school, and second the schools sucked in Mississippi, and it didnât matter because he was willing to work and he was strong. It didnât matter to Koko Taylor, and thatâs the generation that so many of the blues artists came out of. And now itâs a really different scene. Part of it is that itâs become the welfare culture, where people have these crappy public educations and canât get jobs, and then they get on welfare because hey, what else can they do? Thatâs the way their kids grow up. So instead of growing up with the Koko Taylor "I was a sharecropper and picked cotton, I know the meaning of work and if you work hard enough you can make it," now itâs "you canât get a job" which is true and "if you get a job, you canât make it." Those union jobs donât exist anymore, you know Koko and her husband he worked two shifts she cleaned houses, they bought a house. Not a big house, not a fancy house, but they owned property. They were sharecroppers and they owned property. Thatâs a big move. Now it canât happen.

All those roads up for willing people with great work ethics are gone. And those were the people that hung out in my blues bars. It wasnât the unemployed people it was the people who were working and blowing off steam on a Saturday night. Thatâs why most of them were nice people, and people always talk about "Werenât the blues bars dangerous?" And I say I mostly saw people who were better dressed than I was, you know, women in dresses, guys in suits because it was date night. You know, it was like " I worked all week for the chance to take my wife or my girlfriend out, Iâm not going to go out and have a fight or be sloppy or be unwashed," just the opposite. It was more like ÎOh, look at that white guy in a T-shirt, ugh."