Chicago Blues Allstars

TWO YEARS AGO, I went to the now-extinct Club 47 to hear Paul Butterfield. That same year, The Cream came out with a song written by a Mississippi bluesman, Skip Pames, called "I'm So Glad." And the Cream were on their way to success. The Rolling Stones had drawn thousands of screaming kids at The Boston Garden, singing such songs as "Little Red Rooster," a song sung by the Mississippi-origined bluesman, Howlin' Wolf, many years before. The Yardbirds had cut an album with the late blues harmonica player from Mississippi, Sonny Boy Williamson. The album sold well -- to the many, many Yardbirds fans.

All of these groups openly admitted that they owed their success to such people as Muddy Waters. Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter Jacobs, J.B. Hutto, and the rest of the old-style blues musicians who had carried the blues up from the south to Chicago. And yet of all these great artists, few remain. Sonny Boy, Elmore James, Little Walter have all died. And the rest of the people in Chicago like J.B. Hutto and Homesick James (Elmore's cousin) barely make a living and are still playing in the same Chicago bars. Only Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf have achieved any sort of success. And while in concert, they play the same beautiful blues that they obviously choose to play, in the recording studio they are asked to play a cheap, "psychedelicized" blues as on Muddy's latest "Electric Mud" album. The album (like Wolf's latest psychedelic Wolf album) has sold well. And it becomes harder and harder to keep the bues alive.

But Monday night, I went down to the Jazz Workshop to hear The Chicago Blues Allstars (a group put together by Muddy Waters to tour the country--Johnny Shines on guitar, Shaky Walter Horton on harmonica, Sunnyland Slim on Piano, Willie Dixon on bass, and Clifton James on drums), a rare collection of great individual artists who grew up in the south and later moved to Chicago. Shaky Walter and Johnny Shines met in Memphis after Johnny Shines had travelled and played with one of the greatest and most innovative blues people, Robert Johnson (who was killed in 1937 at the age of 21). Like Robert Johnson, who wrote such great songs as the classic "Dust My Broom" and Muddy Waters" "Walking Blues," Johnny Shines plays a beautiful slide guitar and sings with a clearness and urgency that can hardly be matched. Shaky Walter along with Sunnyland Slim, and Willie Dixon (who wrote such classic songs as "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "I Just Want To Make Love To You") and Clifton James (who backs Bo Diddley on his recordings with Chess Records) complements Johnny Shines with an understated and beautiful mellow harp that places him in the same category as the late, great blues harpists, Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter.

One might be wary of all these "Allstars" in one group. But they work together beautifully, all springing from the same great tradition of Delta blues. And when Johnny Shines went into his "tribute to a friend, the late Robert Johnson," playing "standing' at the Crossroads" with his mellow slide guitar, and a slight tremble in his voice, the rest of the band came right together. And that was the blues--no longer a legend; very much alive.