How Blue Can You Get?

##### "A Distinctly Bluesy Condition" by Carlo Rotella, in The American Scholar (Autumn 2002), 1785 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., 4th Fl., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Buddy Guy’s blues guitar playing, "as wildly over the top in a torrent of fast, loud, instantly recognizable as his voice, can be often distorted notes that regain their purity shrewdly pent up, but when he lets himself when sustained on a bent string pinned to the go—which is most of the time—it soars fingerboard." That’s one of the characteristics that have put the 62-year-old Guy squarely in the middle of an argument over the state of Chicago blues, writes Rotella, an English professor at Boston College.

Guy grew up in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and followed the well-worn track to Chicago in 1957, just in time to play a part in the golden age of Chicago-style electric blues. His name easily sidles in among those of the greats, now mostly departed: Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Magic Sam, and others. But the city’s blues scene started to break up during the mid-1960s. Shaking off the initial shock of urban life, black audiences increasingly found the music’s "down home" sounds antique, while teenagers in thrall to the rock and soul music that borrowed so freely from the blues couldn’t relate to the adult perspective of most blues songs. And the landscape of Chicago itself changed, as the South Side Bronzeville neighborhood that had long sustained the music disintegrated.

Today, the Chicago blues scene has shifted to a very different kind of neighborhood, including the affluent North Side lakefront, and a very different kind of audience. A white audience. That’s roughly where the arguments start.

Critics such as Bill Dahl see the story of Chicago blues as a long slide since the ’50s. They "see a once-vital genre reduced to a hotlicks subset of guitar rock, a new Dixieland (with ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ in the role of ‘When the Saints Come Marching In’) designed to satisfy tourists seeking the rock aesthetic’s equivalent of the source of the Nile," writes Rotella.

The critics smell the stink of inauthenticity, with black musicians "playing white" and white musicians straining to "sound black" in pursuit of the new blues audience.

And then there’s Buddy Guy, wailing away like some white "abstractionist guitar hero," an Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page. In classic Chicago blues, notes Rotella, hot guitar playing advertised itself as "an extension of the human voice raised in song." In the new "postindustrial" blues, the guitar rules. And Guy is the case in point.

He is the dominant figure on the Chicago blues scene. He has an international reputation, his own successful South Loop blues bar, and, at long last, a solid recording contract. He’s even appeared in a Gap ad. Guy is among those—such as Chicago’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Lois Weisberg—who see the new Chicago blues as a triumph for the musicians (who, after all, didn’t have to make up all those old songs about hard times), the city, and the races. The blues belongs to everybody, they proclaim.

Rotella himself comes down squarely on both sides. Yes, Guy acts like a rock guitar wizard, but you could hear that in his music in the 1950s, too. "His music reposes in a bed of changes and contradictions—a complicated situation, both decline and renaissance and also neither."