Bert Way is a student at U. of Mississippi and a research assistant at Living Blues Magazine. He can be contacted c/o Living Blues Magazine, Hill Hall Room 301, U. of Mississippi, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University, MS 38677. <fax#601-232-7842> Email: lblues@barnard.cssc.olemiss.edu or agway@sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu
In the transformation of rural blues into urban blues a frequent stopping point for a confluence of sounds was the Maxwell Street market in west Chicago. Beginning in the 1920s, Maxwell Street became common ground for a wide range of secular and sacred music stylist converging on Chicago during the Great Migration. During a fifty year time span, Maxwell Street was a small section of Chicago that offered transplanted blacks from the rural South some of the comforts of their former lifestyles as a social center where they could gather during time off from jobs in the city's burgeoning steel mills, slaughterhouses, and factories. As an open air market, Maxwell Street offered bargains from street vendors on anything from clothes and food, to snake-oil medicines and love-charms; but the most enduring attraction was music. This was the primary meeting place for all newly arrived singers and the center of the amateur blues activity of Chicago.
The market area extended over a few blocks on the near West Side off South Halsted Street with the focal point being Maxwell, Peoria, Sangamon, and Newberry Streets. In the first wave of migration from the South, the West Side was practically unknown to Chicago's black population. The South Side was the primary destination for the newly arrived. The first boom of black migration into Chicago occurred during and after World War I. The war closed foreign immigration and the city's labor supply ran low, so industrial jobs opened up for southern blacks who were looking for a way out of the oppression laden South. From 1916 to 1919 about 500,000 blacks traveled North and in the 20s one million more followed. Of all northern destinations, Chicago became the most popular. The Chicago Defender, the city's black owned newspaper, was the most widely read paper in the black South, and it afforded prospective migrants a vision of an exciting city with a vibrant and assertive black community. Stories from family members and friends also added to a growing anticipation among many southerners about hitting the big city.
It has been often cited that the Great Migration was a result of a push-pull effect on the southern black population. The strongest push factors from the South included mechanization of farm implements, government intervention into farm practices, and the discriminatory economic structure of the sharecropper and tenant system. Like most technological innovation, farm mechanization reduced the need for human labor because one mechanical harvester could do the work of ten wage laborers. Government programs acted to support the unequal sharecropper system by giving crop subsidies directly to white landowners, affording them the opportunity to buy new implements, while leaving poor black farmers with very little. Underlying all of these factors was the base discrimination felt by blacks in all aspects of life. The northern cities offered hope to the South's grossly segregated society, and with the lagging northern work force because of the war, southern blacks finally had an outlet to a different, if not better, life.
For southern black musicians, these factors may have been altered from that of most migrants. The push factors were firmly in place, but the musicians did not feel the same pull as others. In the twenties, Chicago became the home of black recording companies, so while bluesmen were in the market for jobs, they were not necessarily looking for factory jobs. The record companies sent out talent scouts much like industrialists sent labor scouts, so many black musicians had their goals set on record contracts. Companies like Vocalion, OKeh (Columbia), Victor, and Gennett began recording many southern artists and marketing the cuts as "race records". The "race record" market began in the early part of the century with rural blues like that of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Papa Charlie Jackson, but as the musicians moved to the city, the music evolved into the sounds of artists like Tampa Red and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Tampa Red (born Hudson Whittaker in Lee County, Georgia) developed the first urban blues sound onto record with his recording of "It's Tight Like That" for Vocalion in September 1928. This new sound was defined by the separate instrumentation of a guitar and a piano. Traditional rural blues consisted of a soloist singing to his own accompaniment on either of these two instruments, but Tampa Red, and his pianist Georgia Tom (Thomas A. Dorsey, born in Carroll County, Georgia), put the two instruments together to form the first urban blues sound. The sound was possible because of the sedentary nature of the new urban setting. The rural blues sound was a result of the itinerant bluesman moving from place to place, so a single guitar was the only practical accompaniment. As the music moved into the clubs of Chicago's South Side, then it was possible to have the piano-guitar combination, and later a multitude of combinations.
The prewar record companies relied on the established sounds of Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson on the club scene, but if a musician was unknown to the established artists and record companies then he turned to the life of a street singer. This was a familiar position for most southern bluesmen who "hoboed" all around the South trying to make a buck. When his travels carried him to Chicago the unknown bluesman had to find an audience, and the largest audience he could reach was found at the Maxwell Street market. The area was designated an open-air market by city ordinance in 1912, but the city's black population were not visitors or residents until the twenties.
Maxwell Street was the focal point of the Jewish immigrant community from the 1850s to the 1920s. Jews from Russia and Poland converged on the area in the mid-19th century and brought with them the long tradition of the open-air market. Shops and tenements lined the streets in this area, and vendors, shop owners, and hustlers hawked their wares seven days a week. In 1893 the Maxwell Street Settlement was founded as a welcome station for newly arrived Jews looking for work and a place to live. As time passed the immigrants became economically stable and many fled the area for a more secure lifestyle. In 1910 the area was ninety percent Jewish, but in the twenties the district went from zero to sixty percent black. By 1930, the strip between Maxwell Street and 14th Street was solidly black.
While the demographics shifted, the market remained. The permanent store fronts remained open and on the weekends the bazaar atmosphere took on a new life with makeshift stands catering to the new black population and the sounds of blues musicians, songsters, medicine show entertainers, and southern gospel hymns entertaining patrons. Known as 'Jewtown' to the musicians, Maxwell Street became the center for all unknown musicians looking for a recording break. Before World War II the record companies remained predictable with only recording the established performers, but after the war the record market opened up with more companies willing to take risks on the many street performers of Maxwell Street.
By 1942, Bluebird Recording Company was the most prolific of Chicago's record companies, but when the United States entered the war, shellac rationing was introduced and all of the companies had to reduce their race releases. The shellac shortage was minor compared with the worries of the American Federation of Musicians. The union grew increasingly concerned about the effects of the jukebox on the livelihoods of members and in July 1942 the union's president, J.C. Petrillo, ordered a complete ban on commercial recording. Many of the clubs that once carried live music now found jukeboxes equally as pleasing to their patrons. The studios closed and remained so for two years.
The union also had an effect on street musicians. Hammie Nixon recalls, "most of our fooling around was on the street - till we hit that union. We hit that union in the early part, too. Well, they stopped that street business. Their records stopped it, too. They didn't want you on the street". Nixon is unclear on specifics, but apparently the AFM was concerned with the street musicians taking business away from the live performances in the clubs. In a 1995 interview, Snooky Pryor also recalls the effect of the union on Chicago musicians. During an early club performance, Pryor states that Sonny Boy Williamson's business agent "told me he'd better not catch me playin' nowhere in Chicago, no kind of music unless'n I had a union card. And I had to buy a union card". The AFM failed to realize they limited the future of prospective members of the union, and many talented street musicians were initially forgotten within the union's atmosphere of exclusivity. Of the union, Johnny Williams remembered, "if you could play, you was gonna play with somebody on Maxwell Street. They wasn't snooty. When you joined the union, you wasn't allowed to do that. That's what broke us up." While the union did not halt street playing for the uninitiated, they did prohibit members from playing on Maxwell Street and nonmembers must have felt pressure to conform. Regardless of the union's stance on street playing, the lifting of the ban in 1944 ushered in a new era of recording activity and the breaking of the monopoly enjoyed by the major record companies.
When recording recommenced, Bluebird and the other major companies quickly began releasing records of their old favorites, but this time there was competition from the new independent record companies like Savoy in New York, Modern in Los Angeles and King in Cincinnati, soon followed by hundreds more. The ending of the shellac rationing, the lifting of the ban, and the prosperity of the postwar years all facilitated the birth of a multitude of small record companies trying to cut into the large market of the major labels. The advantage of these independents was the reluctance of major companies to pursue new talent. There was a vast pool of undiscovered talent and the smaller companies dipped into it, partly because they were forced to since the majors had a monopoly on the established artists. This undiscovered talent was largely to be found roaming the Maxwell Street market.
During the forties Maxwell Street regulars included bluesmen like Daddy Stovepipe, Floyd and Moody Jones, Snooky Pryor, Johnny Young, Uncle Johnny Williams, Othum Brown, and the future international star Little Walter. This group incorporated what has come to be known as the "Maxwell Street School" of blues. Unlike the established recording artists, these musicians did not live a stable, sedentary lifestyle. They were ramblers, and the same goes for the music they played. The music of the Maxwell Street market retained the emotion of a Deep South juke joint rather than an urban street corner. The musicians were well traveled and not yet influenced by studio producers, and with the rural South experience vividly flowing through their consciousness they created a uniquely southern atmosphere juxtaposed against an indubitable northern backdrop. Most retained the life of the itinerant bluesman only staying in Chicago for short periods of time and frequently returning to their regular rounds in the juke joints of the South. This contact with the traditional blues stage was critical to the development of the Maxwell Street sound. Fresh folk blues artists consistently moved in and out of Chicago bringing the creativity and tradition of rural areas with them. The market was a cornucopia of sound with different groups on every corner and musicians experimenting with various combinations each week. In a 1973 interview with Sandy Sutherland, Uncle Johnny Williams remembered:
It would be fun to see it. Here's a bunch sitting here, way down the street there's another bunch. On a Sunday it would be seven or eight different bunches, and people would pass by giving you dimes and quarters, halves and so forth--cut fifty of sixty dollars. There'd be a guy have his own group, somebody would have a drop cord and run it from a building, to the street and we'd pay them a dollar, or a dollar and a half to use the juice. And so we would go there, we would start something like 12 o'clock and we'd play there till four, five then we would get up our toolsand go to other jobs. Just different groups used to play. Just the first guy come along 'You wanna work with me today?'...'Yes' and so we'd just match up there together, just go to work-- Baby Face Leroy, all of us we'd just hook up together and maybe I'm with this guy this time, next time I'm with somebody else.
With the quantity of talent on Maxwell Street the new record companies did not have to venture far to pick up new artists. Perhaps the company in the best position to capitalize was no further than the distance that sound can travel. The Maxwell Radio Record Company, founded by Bernard Isaac Abrams, only released two records, but its presence provided incentive for the street musicians.
In Chicago Breakdown, Mike Rowe states that the songs recorded by Maxwell Radio Record Company, and released under the Ora-Nelle label, are examples of the "first Chicago recordings of the new postwar country blues artists". It is unclear how speculative this statement is, but the recordings did introduce four new musicians to the Chicago blues scene. On side one of Ora-Nelle 711 Little Walter blew his harmonica and sang "I Just Keep Loving Her", backed up by Othum Brown on guitar. On side two Brown sang "Ora-Nelle Blues" and was accompanied by Walter's harp. Apparently an old girlfriend of Othum Brown's gave Abrahams the new company's name.
The other release on Ora-Nelle came from the mandolin-guitar duo Johnny Young and Johnny Williams. Johnny Young was born in Vicksburg Mississippi, in January 1917, and gained an interest in music when his family moved to Rolling Fork in the Mississippi Delta when he was 12 years old. He picked up the mandolin at the advice of his uncle and learned various styles from local musicians like the Chatman Brothers (the Mississippi Sheiks), and started playing house parties in his teens. He moved to Chicago in 1940 and in 1947 he was playing on Maxwell Street with Johnny Williams, or with Snooky Pryor and guitarists Floyd and Moody Jones. Williams recalls, "Then Johnny Young and I, were brothers and sisters' children, Floyd he had a job and he and Snook they went South, I think in '46, and so Johnny Young and I, we took over their place."
On the second Ora-Nelle release Young sings "Money Taking Woman" against his own mandolin accompaniment with Williams on guitar. On the other side Williams sings "Worried Man Blues" to his hurried guitar style and Young's mandolin. On the subject of that recording Williams says "Well, I worked and I cut this test, and so I take him (Abrams) this test down there, and at that time that beat you hear on the guitar, I was the only guy had it, and he liked it, the beat, and so then he wanted us to cut it". It could be argued that the "beat" Williams referred to bore a close semblance to Delta blues masters Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson. Williams was born in Alexandria, Louisiana in May 1906 and learned guitar under the tutelage of his uncle Anthony Williams and the musicians around the area like the Chatman Brothers, Pet and Can, and Charlie Patton. On his first musical experiences, Williams recalled "to play guitar myself at the age of 10, 11 years old, I had to go somewhere else because it was a religious family, you know. So I would go to other people's houses. I kept on learnin' to play the guitar like that. In the end, everything Charley Patton made, I could play it. Later on I got to know Charley Patton myself. When he got popular in '27, I was livin' in Shaw, and he was from around Shaw. He played out in the country, them country dances." Williams strong background in the Delta blues gave him the incentive to try his hand in Chicago. Upon arrival in 1926, he immediately traveled in the established blues circles, and at the same time never neglected his roots. Williams recalled: among the recording guys in Chicago that I was really familiar with was such as Tampa Red and Big Bill, we all was good friends and them guys was from way back you know when I used to jam with them. I knew Lonnie Johnson but I never played anything with him. And Robert Johnson, I met him once on Arkansas, that was in somewhere along about '34 or '35. I new him from his records well. The last record that I recall he made was "The Terraplane Blues". He played a slide on them like some kinda something. With these credentials it is a wonder that Williams' career as bluesman ended as early as 1959, but when he found religion, his career in the blues was over.
The Maxwell Radio Record Company was not the only independent studio looking for talented street musicians. Chester Scales, who had a record shop on the North Side of Chicago, recorded Snooky Pryor and Moody Jones in 1948, and released the record on Planet. On "Telephone Blues" Pryor sings and plays harmonica while Jones plays boogie riffs on the guitar that gave the song what would be considered a modern groove today. The reverse side, "Snooky and Moody's Boogie", is another distinctive upbeat tune with a more infectious feel than most other blues recorded at the time. The mixing of musicians on the street led to a new sound that coupled the diverging music from the different regions of the South with the urgent feel of the city. Out of this confluence of regional music in an urban atmosphere came a new style that came to be known as urban blues.
Another team of musicians who frequented Maxwell Street and helped facilitate the new Chicago sound were Hammie Nixon and Sleepy John Estes. Although they retained the traveling life of itinerant bluesmen, they did spend a great deal of time in Chicago. Nixon and Estes spent their early years in Brownsville, Tennessee playing and traveling in Brownsville string bands with musicians like Charlie Pickett, Brownsville Son Bonds, and Yank Rachell. They made some early recordings for Bluebird in the thirties and a record for Ora-Nelle in 1947 that was never released; and they became "rediscovered" in Brownsville during the folk revival of the sixties. The stabilization of transportation lines made it possible for men like Nixon and Estes to travel greater distances than their predecessors. While early century bluesmen remained in the different regions of the South, musicians like Nixon and Estes played all over the South and the North. Of their visits to Chicago, Nixon says:
We didn't stay too long. Just in and out. We did a lot of street playing in Chicago. We had a washboard band back in the '40s, playing up and down these streets. We were riding them old freight trains then. We made that record about Mae West ('Hobo Jungle Blues'). We'd ride that Mae West a lot, put it down in Chicago Heights. Yeah, we were going all across this country. Me and John were sleeping in jungles and old Winchester Slim (police) got at us several times about riding freight trains. Two-Gun Pete (police) get on us here about disturbing way in the night. Standing on some of these corners, you know. Well, most of our hits though, we'd always hit them there gangsters over on that West Side. We'd sure hit there every night we were in town. Make about $15 or $20 a piece.
Although Nixon and Estes did not live permanently in Chicago, they were very familiar with the city knowing where a street musician could pick up an audience and share the many different sounds they picked up in their travels.
It is difficult to know exactly how many established bluesmen started their careers on Maxwell Street. There are many comments from street musicians referring to artists like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, and even Muddy Waters playing on the street, but few citations from the musicians themselves. Those who made a national impact on the music scene considered their former roles as street musicians an embarrassment. Johnny Williams remarked, "You found all kinds of musicians on Maxwell Street. Some could and some couldn't. But they was out there. Muddy Waters was out there. After he cut that first record and got up in the world he didn't associate down there no more." Delmark Records' Bob Koester sheds light on the predicament Little Walter found himself in when he returned to the street: "There was some splendid talent on Maxwell Street. You know the picture of Little Walter holding a guitar? (1963) That was Little Walter on Maxwell Street playing guitar, because if he played harp everyone would know who he was and his price would go down in the clubs". The street was popularly recorded as a place for amateurs, but many like Walter could not resist the fun provided by Maxwell Street. In a rare recollection, Johnny Williams said, "I came back to Chicago in 1938. That's when I met Memphis Minnie-- over in Jewtown. Right on the southwest corner of Maxwell and Halsted. She was playing guitar in a harmonica band. That night she wore common clothes. I talked with her, even drank some with her. You know, if you got drinkin', she gonna be in that." Hammie Nixon remembers "Tampa Red, John (Estes), and I used to play all along the streets", so even the previously established players like Tampa Red and Memphis Minnie had sojourns on the street regardless of the skeptics like Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy was aware of the scrupulous nature of many musicians when he heard Floyd Jones singing a new song. Jones recalls, "after I start singing it on the street this fellow Big Bill Broonzy said, 'You better play with me or somebody's going to take it'. So I didn't sing that song no more on the street". It would be interesting to discover the extent to which original material was stolen from the street and issued under recognizable artist names.
Speculation that the open air atmosphere of Maxwell Street triggered the first amplified sounds of urban blues is common, but hard evidence is sparse. Johnny Williams remembers having "that long extension cord run up through a window and we'd get our juice from those people that had homes there. That's how we'd run our guitars and microphones." More compelling is Snooky Pryor's reminiscence in a 1995 interview. "That's where I bought me a PA system with two speakers, and a mike look like a snuff box. It looked like it made out of cast iron. Just had a front to it, and all the back was covered, you know what I mean. And then after takin' off the sides to it, then I came back to Maxwell Street: just me, the harmonica, and a microphone. And hooked up, and it was loud. I guess nobody had never seed nothin' like that before... And I started the big noise around Chicago." Like all oral history this assertion should be looked on with a critical eye, but it is affecting nonetheless. Although electric blues probably did evolve simultaneously in the clubs, the carnival atmosphere of the street must have taken it to another level.
In blues circles the name Maxwell Street is probably best known through Robert Nighthawk's album Live on Maxwell Street, released on Rounder Records in 1965. Nighthawk was born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas in November 1909. As a child, he learned guitar from Houston Stackhouse and started playing professionally in the early thirties around the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. In the thirties and forties he was in and out of Chicago and recorded his first records for Bluebird in 1937. Nighthawk had a sporadic recording career and was not heard from again until Muddy Waters brought him into Chess studios and he recorded "Sweet Black Angel" in 1949. Throughout this period Nighthawk continued to play on Maxwell Street when he lived in Chicago. By the time he recorded the Maxwell Street album, his sound was unmistakably urban. His amplified slide guitar sings along with the distinctive rhythm section. Maxwell Street regular, Johnny Young, provides the cadence on rhythm guitar, and Carey Bell and Robert Whitehead lay down the beat on bass and drums. On lead Nighthawk plays piercing melody with the single line soloing that defines urban blues. With Live on Maxwell Street, the journey from the acoustic soloist of country blues to the four piece band of the city seems complete. Nighthawk summed up the Maxwell Street experience best when he said:
Well, when I really think about it, I think the blues will never die. It's always been the blues. You can always come up with something else, but when you wind up you'll wind up with the blues every time. It's just like something or other you can't get rid of. Lately I went back to Maxwell Street- I been playing there off and on about 24 years now. Most all music more of less starts right off from Maxwell Street, and so you wind up going there. You meets lots of musicians, gets lot of jobs from Maxwell Street. Mostly every musician in Chicago played on Maxwell Street at one time.
Perhaps more important than the Maxwell Street mystique is the street's role in perpetuating the culture of the blues. The open market atmosphere gave the musicians a place to share common interests with others from the South. Many migration experts continue to pontificate on the extent to which a migrant population assimilates into the mainstream of its new location. There is little doubt that the black migrants where influenced heavily by urban centers like Chicago, but they worked very hard at preserving a lifestyle similar to that of the South. Places like Maxwell Street provided the equivalent of the front porch at dusk, or the turn-row at noon, for the urban black population to continue the highly social life they were accustomed to. The Chicago Defender keenly observed the stubborn nature of black southern culture when an editorialists remarked, "It is no difficult task to get people out of the South, but you have a job on your hands when you attempt to get the South out of them".
Until 1994, when the City of Chicago uprooted the market from the Maxwell Street area, the open air bazaar continued to serve much the same purpose as it did during those formative years of the early and mid twentieth century. New arrivals learned from veterans of the street scene. Amateurs honed their chops for market patrons. Every Sunday the community came together regardless of race or ethnic origin. Today, the sanitizing efforts of "urban renewal" have relocated the market, but at what cost? Will the unique spirit of the market endure in its present location, or is this move an indication of a lack of public and political support for an institution that was once vital to the music scene of Chicago? Was it a well intentioned effort to clean up a decaying area of the city, or a political game that has become so typical that we turn away with helpless apathy? These are questions for the populace of Chicago who have nurtured Maxwell Street for the past century. Letting something as rich as the Maxwell Street Market simply fade away without some public resistance would be a travesty. The market's past is intact, but its future rest with the people of Chicago.
(1) Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989.
(2) Philpott, Thomas Lee, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930. Oxford University Press, New York, 1978.
(3) Rowe, Mike, Chicago Breakdown, Eddison Press LTD, London.
(4) Living Blues, no. 19, January/February 1975. "Hammie Nixon and Sleepy John Estes" interview by Kip Lornell. p. 13-19.
(5) Living Blues, no. 22, July/August 1975. "A Day on Maxwell Street", by Thomas M. Swain p.12-14.
(6) Living Blues, no. 111, October, 1993. "The Maxwell Street Market: No More Fun on the Street" by Steven Sharpe. p. 33-39.
(7) Living Blues, no.123, September/October 1995. "I Started the Big Noise Around Chicago", interview by Jim O'Neal, Steve Wisner, and David Nelson. p. 8-21.
(8) Living Blues, no.127, May/June 1996, "Being Regular With People", interview by John Anthony Brisbin. p. 28-41.
(9) Blues Unlimited, no. 99, February/March 1973. "Uncle Johnny Williams", interview by Sandy Sutherland. p. 7-9.
(10) Live on Maxwell Street, Robert Nighthawk, liner notes by Peter Guralnick. Rounder Records, 1965.
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