Mike Weeks <mweeks@expert.cc.purdue.edu> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997
To: David.C.Broski@uic.edu
I am quite sure that you have received a lot of mail on this subject, but every little bit helps, so here are my two bits. I have lived in the Chicagoland area my entire life. For most of that lifetime, I have been a musician. I have been listening to and playing the blues for years.
As a musician, it is important that we are able to show musicians that follow in our footsteps where it all came from, and also to show them why. I was taught and shown by the musicians that preceded me, and the blues and Maxwell Street is an integral part of that. In a world that is increasingly becoming sanitized, reworked, and redeveloped, as a culture we are forgetting where we came from. The loss of Maxwell Street will not lead to the destruction of the blues - the blues will be around forever. But in order for blues to thrive as it should, places like Maxwell Street, as Beale Street was, must be preserved. We owe it to future generations - not just blues fans, but musicians, Chicagoans, and all people of the world. Maxwell Street is Chicago.
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