Blues on Maxwell Street - comments by Sterling Plumpp

Sterling Plumpp is a Professor of African-American Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a poet, a frequent visitor to Maxwell Street, and was a principal interviewee in the Discovery Channel series on the Great Migration, The Promised Land.

These are excerpts from a article by Howard Reich who interviewed Professor Plumpp. Chicago Tribune, "Musicians also singing the Maxwell Street blues". April 13, 1993, p. C1

• I've been coming to Maxwell Street to hear music since 1962, and it always has been a fantastic showcase for the real folk blues.
• When I got older, I would go to Maxwell Street to take notes, because in a matter of seconds I could come into contact with all kinds of blues. Most people think there is only one thing called 'the blues' but at Maxwell Street you could hear the Charlies Patton strand of blues, the Elmore James strand, whatever.
• I heard people like 'Smokey' Smothers and Little Howlin Wolf there, but even better than that was the anonymous blues people who would come to play their hearts out, telling their full story with their feeling and their emotion.
• In black American life over the centuries, music turned up wherever business was being done, wherever the economy was centered. Where you'd see a cotton gin, you'd hear music; in the fields, you'd hear music; at the general store, you'd find music.
• To African-Americans, Maxwell Street was like a big general store.
• So the old general store of the South was resurrected on Maxwell Street. And for African-Americans, that meant great music had to be there too.
• I fear that if Maxwell Street passes, we'll lose forever a venue with a very strong black flavor and audience.
• Maxwell Street is one of the last places where authentic blues musicians can play authentic blues for the people who first inspired them.

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