Maxwell Street Musicians

No other music is as closely associated with Chicago as the blues, a vocal and instrumental jazz style of African-American origin that evolved from pre-Civil War sorrow songs. The blues was brought to Chicago in the early 1900s by Southerners following the Illinois Central Railroad. In time, the blues has acquired a recognizable word and music pattern. The lyrics consist of three-line stanzas, with the second line repeating the first. The tempo is slow; the melody, mournful and flowing. Other defining characteristics of the blues include dissonant harmonies in the accompaniment and breaks in the melody to allow the singer to interject exclamations or for the instrumentalists to improvise. The blues reverberates throughout Chicago, from concert halls to blues clubs to street corner gatherings, such as this one on Maxwell Street, the location of Chicago's largest open-air marketplace, which thrived from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s.