Sweet Home Chicago?
Contemplating the state of the blues in the Windy City
By James Porter
(Excerpted from Weekly Wire, December 13, 1999)
...In the black community, just like the country crowd is made up
of
former rockers, blues was always the music that older black folks
turned
to when they were too old to relate to soul music. In past decades
there
was always a parallel black audience for the blues that was just
outside
public sight: Bobby Rush, Willie Clayton, Denise LaSalle, Johnnie
Taylor.
Sometime during the eighties, this kind of blues, more soul-oriented
than anything you'll hear in the North Side clubs, was eased off
the black
stations—by this decade, you heard it mainly on specialty programs
(like Mr. A's late-night show on the otherwise classical
WNIB-FM),
or on a station like WSSD-FM, which plays soul-blues all day, but
at 88.1 on the dial can only be heard on the South Side...
Mr. A
[Photo taken in the WNIB Control Room]
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