Synopses & Reviews
The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer.
For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest.
From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.
Synopsis
Blue Chicago takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how iconicand#8212;yet emptyand#8212;images of the blues are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, David Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increasing frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest.
"Chicago has given the world distinctive forms of urban blues and urban sociology. . . . In Blue Chicago, David Grazian's lucid and bracingly unpious study of the blues scene, the two homegrown traditions meet with satisfying results."and#8212;Carlo Rotella, Chicago Tribune
About the Author
David Grazian is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: How Blue Can You Get- A Night in a
Chicago Blues Club
Introduction: Black and Tan Fantasy- Searching
for the Chicago Blues
1. Blues in Black and White- The Politics of Race and
Authenticity in a Chicago Blues Club
2. The Fashion of Their Dreams- Inventing Authenticity
in the Nocturnal City
3. Like Therapy- The Blues Club as a Haven
4. Keepinand#8217; It Real- Chicago Blues Musicians and the Search for Authenticity
5. Chicago Confidential- The Rise of the Blues Club as a Tourist Attraction
6. Sweet Home Chicago- Selling Authenticity in the Urban Metropolis
7. Conclusion- The Search for Authenticity
Notes
Bibliography
Index