Andy McKaie <andy.mckaie@unistudios.com> Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998
Note: Universal Music Group owns MCA Records (B.B. King), Chess Records, Duke-Peacock Records, and Excello Records, among other labels. He won a pair of Grammies for Reissue Producer, Historical Recordings, box sets of Chuck Berry and Billie Holiday. His reissue packages have been nominated for a total of nine Grammies. He has also dominated the W.C. Handy Awards reissue category, winning 8 of the last 12 years and been voted Reissue Producer of the Year in the Living Blues' Critics Poll three times, including this past year's poll. He has done packages on everyone from Bo Diddley to Segovia, from Brenda Lee to Lynyrd Skynyrd, from Little Walter to Jody Watley. --SB
It has often been said that Blues are the roots of all of today's popular music. If that is correct - and undoubtedly it is - Maxwell Street was the birthplace of the most significant, most influential form of the blues in the latter half of the 20th Century, Chicago blues. Maxwell Street was the crossroads where Southern blacks brought their music, urbanized it, and eventually it was brought to the world by way of such legendary artists as Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and so many others, who in turn influenced artists from the '50s and '60s all the way to today's Top 40.
This street is to Chicago what Beale Street is to Memphis or Bleecker Street is to Greenwich Village in New York - the historic incubator of each city's legendary musical heritage. Beale Street has been revived as a major music and entertainment center for Memphis, and all along Bleecker Street in New York there are landmarks on the relevant buildings placed there by the City of New York, retelling the story of the various musical venues' histories and the artists who once called the area and the clubs home.
Maxwell Street should be treated with similar reverence and the buildings there preserved as the vestiges of this culturally and historically significant area.
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