Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [22]
The side-effects of prohibition weren’t all bad, particularly its influence on the music industry and specifically jazz. Because it was the music of the speakeasies, jazz became very popular very fast, and it helped integration by uniting mostly black musicians with mostly white crowds. Chicago played its part in the development of jazz, but it played an even bigger role in rock’n’roll, which you could say was invented by black men (and women) in a little room in South Chicago, where Muddy Waters and all the other greats – including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Etta James – made their first records.
That room was the recording studio of Chess Records, a legend in the blues and rhythm’n’blues world. In 1928 two Jewish brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, arrived in Chicago as Polish immigrants. They started a few bars and by the 1940s had a nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. One of the singers who performed there was a certain McKinley Morganfield, who boosted his earnings by busking around South Chicago during daylight hours. He was better known to everybody by his nickname – Muddy Waters.
The Chess brothers already had an interest in a record label called Aristocrat, so they used it to record Muddy’s raw singing style, which perfectly reflected the spirit of the Chicago blues bars. The recordings were a great success, and soon Leonard and Phil were able to buy out their partners in Aristocrat and change the company’s name to Chess Records.
Muddy’s increasing fame drew other young Mississippi bluesmen to Chicago, such as Little Walter Jacobs and a twenty-stone farm worker named Chester Burnette, who soon became known as Howlin’ Wolf. In their footsteps followed Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker and Willie Mabon. All legends.
In 1955 Muddy introduced the Chess brothers to a twenty-eight-year-old singer and guitarist who was on holiday from St Louis. He sang ‘Ida Red’, a song he’d written himself. Leonard and Phil liked the song but suggested a new title. Renamed ‘Maybellene’, it was the first of many Top Forty hits for the guy from St Louis – Chuck Berry – who went on to write and record a string of hits that became signature songs of rock’n’roll: ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’.
The studios and offices of Chess Records were based at several locations in South Chicago, but the most famous was immortalised by the Rolling Stones in their song ‘2120 South Michigan Avenue’. Nowadays, it’s home to Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. It’s in a rundown neighbourhood that probably has never seen better days. It has that air of always having been a bit on the skids, but it’s a real place with a proper sense of identity and a community that holds together when times are tough.
Walking up to the old Chess Records building produced a strange sensation in me. In a nondescript street with a wee garden on one side, initially it felt like a non-event. But then I noticed some iron figures set into the garden railings – like a guy playing guitar, who just happened to be Chuck Berry. Wandering along a wee bit further, I spotted another, recognised the guitar, and realised it was Bo Diddley. Before I knew it, I was standing outside the birthplace of rock’n’roll.
As soon as I stepped through the door, I knew I’d arrived somewhere special. It’s holy ground – the Taj Mahal for anyone who likes rock’n’roll. Hallelujah central. And they let me in even though I’m about as black as snow. Then the funniest thing happened. Me and several of the crew all went very quiet and treated the place like a church. Nobody said ‘Ssshhh!’ or anything like that. A silence just fell upon us when we realised we were standing in the actual building where they recorded all those fantastic songs.
There’s a wee museum with some posters on the wall from the old Blues Caravan tours. I remember those posters from when the tours came to Scotland in the sixties.