This is only the quickest outline of how the Blues was shaped by Maxwell Street, the reputed ‘birthplace of the Blues.’ No doubt, Maxwell Street was crucial, symbolically as well as practically in the development of the Blues. Far less clear is what the people and more specifically the diversity that defined Maxwell Street contributed to the Blues. In many ways, Maxwell Street and its market provided the background - the setting, an audience, an opportunity to make a living. The nostalgic memories of racial and ethnic peace and cultural sharing that define our reverence for big cities are all but absent. In Maxwell Street, the greatest influence Jews had on Blues musicians was, in stereotypical fashion, in providing the capital and the recording labels to publicize and disseminate Blues music.

Thus, in the place of some organic mixing of groups amidst the low-brow market of Maxwell Street, we have something more complex in this urban crucible. And yet, there is a central principle, or catalyst, that dominates. It is the energy of commerce that makes Maxwell Street and its blues possible. While the influence of capital does, in the blues later history, lead to a homogenizing of this traditional, folk musical form, it is capital that will also bring that music to far wider audiences. The greatest of ironies is that the economic, social and political convulsions which are rightly so lamented by those celebrants of American folk cultures, may also be largely responsible for the cultural vibrancy that we still find in cities. The ‘sense of place’ of any great city emanates not from stability, stasis, repetition, and homogeneity but from convulsive change which is often destructive, but also historically and potentially, creative.

Blues musician playing on the Chicago subway, November 1999
Author

Epilogue

Johnnie Mae Dawson, who sang with Eddie ‘Pork Chop’ Hines in the 1940s and continued to sing on Maxwell Street through the 1980s and early 1990s, wrote a new blues song a few years ago:

Lord, I’m so unhappy, ‘cause you're takin’ Maxwell Street away. You may not see it right now, but you will be sorry one day.

Maxwell Street has been inspirational. And now, in its demise, it is inspirational as well, for blues musicians and for those who seek to understand and advocate on behalf of cities.

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