Chicago blues scene struggles despite commercial success of Blues Festival

CHICAGO—As the 25th annual Chicago Blues Festival rolls around next week, it is time for a pulse check on the shuffling, rickety old body of the Chicago blues scene.

Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans and visitors will flood Grant Park, at Columbus and Jackson, June 5-8, to hear the likes of B.B. King, Johnny Winter, Koko Taylor and other acts – big and small, local and visiting. Last year’s drew a record attendance of 800,000 over four days, according to Barry Dolins, festival coordinator. Around 35 percent were from the Chicago area; the rest were out-of-towners.

“It’s a major success,” Dolins said, pointing out that festival-goers spent over $100 million at the festival and local businesses.

The Chicago Blues Festival has come a long way since drawing 165,000 at its debut in 1984. What is less clear, though, is whether its commercial success is having an impact on a local blues scene that is struggling on many levels. Once known as the best in the world, Chicago’s blues scene is scattered, dwindling and increasingly isolated from younger generations. Many local blues artists are struggling to find recognition, financial rewards for their craft, and faces under age 40 in their audiences.

“I think my husband would be very disappointed that blues artists still aren’t getting proper pay and recognition,” said Marie Dixon, widow of the iconic Willie Dixon who died in 1992. Dixon died at age 76, after a long career of playing, producing and promoting the blues all over the world.

Willie Dixon also founded one of the Chicago Blues Festival’s sponsors, the Blues Heaven Foundation, now run by his family. Located in the historic Chess Records studio at 2120 S. Michigan Ave., Blues Heaven promotes and documents blues heritage and will host live concerts this summer.

The Blues Heaven Foundation is also hosting after-party concerts during the festival. They will feature Billy Branch, Honeyboy Edwards, Lurrie Bell, Mud Morganfield (Muddy Waters’ son) and Alex Dixon, grandson of Willie Dixon, to name a few.

Though the festival is good for the blues scene because it presents some local artists, said Dixon, there is not enough radio airplay and promotion of the blues to bridge the gap to the younger generations.

“They don’t want to make music that’s not going to get heard,” she said.

As a result, clubs on the South and West Sides have closed, or migrated to the North Side, because they have lost touch with the younger crowds and no longer make enough money to survive, said Dixon, The North Side clubs enjoy the luxury of the mostly white tourist crowds avid for the blues.

And there are some who believe that festival officials paint too rosy a picture of the annual event’s success.

The festival’s attendance estimates are inaccurate, said Bruce Iglauer, founder of Alligator Records, in an email response to questions. Though city officials claim record numbers, he argues that crowds have steadily decreased over the last 10 years.

“At one time, it took 10 minutes of pushing your way through the crowd to get to the Crossroads stage from the Best Buy tent,” Iglauer said. “Now, on most days, you could roll a bowling ball down there.”

“Hey, the park is full, and it’s a big park,” responded Dolin, acknowledging that the crowd estimates are just that--estimates.

Iglauer knows something about declining numbers. Chicago-based Alligator Records, one of the last remaining blues labels, has been hit hard by the general decline of the record industry and by young people’s diminishing appreciation of blues music.

Since the 1990s, Alligator has cut its staff from 23 to 15, Iglauer said, and releases half the number of albums as they did then. Sales were around 400,000 albums a year in the 1990s, he said. This year they expect to sell 250,000.

“The main reason for the plight of the blues,” Iglauer said, “is that it’s viewed as an old form of music.”

“For most hip-hoppers, blues is grandpa’s music, not dad’s.” He noted that the parents of today’s teens listened to more soul than blues.

Despite embracing Internet platforms such as iTunes and MySpace, Alligator’s sales have dropped, partly because the company’s primary market – white Baby Boomers – are less inclined to visit such Internet sites, Iglauer said.

Some observers blame the fading interest in blues on the lack of creativity among blues artists.

“Blues has lost out on popularity in recent years because of lack of airplay, which is partly justified by lack of originality,” said Fernando Jones, a blues musician, scholar, and music professor at Columbia College. He is the author of “I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot,” published in 2003.

Most blues artists are slow to accept change and try new things, Jones said, pointing to himself, Robert Cray and Ronnie Baker Brooks as notable exceptions. The current elders of the Chicago blues scene also make little effort to reach out to young people, he said, in the way that the late greats, such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, reached out to his own generation.

One local bluesman pushing the traditional boundaries of blues music is harp-wielder Billy Branch. Last year he co-hosted a show at the Steppenwolf Theatre called the Blues/Hip-Hop Intersection. It featured him and his band, the Sons of Blues, along with various local hip-hop artists like the BeatMonstas, Avery Young and Sense.

“There’s more pressure these days to do something new,” said Branch, a veteran Chicago bluesman, who will be playing at the Blues Heaven Foundation on June 5. “You don’t want to just imitate what the elder statesmen did.”

The division between the blues and hip-hop generations runs deep, though.

Some black blues musicians feel they are now being passed over for commercial recognition and awards that end up going to white blues artists, Branch said. That exclusion and lack of recognition further widens the gap between the blues and young black people who don’t identify with it.

“We have to be careful or pretty soon people will get the misconception that white people created the blues,” Branch said.

Anyone can feel the blues, he said, but it is important to remember the roots of oppression from which blues music evolved.

“The streets of hip-hop are concrete and metal,” Jones said. “The streets of the blues are rural -- a place of oppression.”

Scholarly rappers, like KRS-One, recognize that the blues are the roots, he said, but the traditions are very different. Young rappers who want their music to be heard will make it in their own homes and push it on the streets, Jones said. Blues artists are traditionally more dependent on white-owned record companies.

“It’s a slave mentality,” Jones said. “Young blues artists have to be more fearless for the blues to have a future.”

So blues music could have a future?

“I believe the blues will always have a future,” Dixon said, “but it may not get the recognition it deserves.”

One rare glimpse of the blues’ future, young and fearless, will be on display at the Chicago Blues Festival on Thursday, 12:45p.m., at the U.S. Cellular Front Porch Stage. Jones’s Columbia College Blues Ensemble, a band of nine 18- to 21-year-olds, is the nation’s only college blues ensemble, he said. They play a mixture of traditional, contemporary and original songs under his direction.

And though blues music is losing out to hip-hop and R&B these days on several fronts, he said, the ensemble’s upcoming performance at the festival is an opportunity to shine and inspire people their own age.

“The Chicago Blues Festival is still the Super Bowl of the blues,” Jones said. “Just playing it is like winning the Super Bowl.”