Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs

By David Grazian

Book Overview

The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer.

For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest.

From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226305686
• ISBN13: 9780226305684
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful, highly readable sociological blues review

Grazian presents the world of Chicago's blues scene with the loving touch of a real fan, and the critical eye of a deep-thinking sociologist. His exploration of notions of "authenticity" in blues is penetrating and insightful, as he examines what it is in the blues experience that makes us think of it as "authentic" -- is it the color of the musician? The world-weariness in his voice? The ambience or clientele of the club? Or is it simply a construct of audience expectations, differing from person to person? Grazian, a blues player himself, skillfully points out how and why the authenticity we seek in our music is a reflection of our search for authenticity, the desire to "keep it real," in culture itself.