Ode to an Adopted Home: The Maxwell Street Blues Documentary

He thought he'd died. While rolling down Chicago's South Side in a convertible, top down on a hot July night, Muddy Waters heard his bottleneck blues "I Can't Be Satisfied" coursing through the streets once again, this time from "way upstairs somewhere." What was actually just the soundtrack to a Chicago house party escaping through an open window, high up above, was mistaken as a siren song from the afterlife.

When he wasn't singing at parties packed with transplanted Mississippians like himself, Muddy spent afternoons driving a delivery truck, a job that allowed for catnaps on the clock, between shifts, to sleep off the late nights. After recording "I Can't Be Satisfied" for Leonard Chess in 1948, he was struck by the ubiquity of the track as he charted his route. Spotting any neon beer sign, he'd pull the truck over and hop into the bar, skimming the jukebox for his hit. "I might buy me a beer and play the record and then leave," he said. "Don't tell nobody nothing. Before long, every blues joint there was, that record was on the jukebox. And if you come in and sat there for a little while, if anybody was in there, they gonna punch it."

This grassroots rise, detailed in Robert Palmer's essential history Deep Blues, is important for two reasons. For one, it underscores the availability of work in postwar Chicago. The city's heavy industries catered not only to European immigrants, but the Southern sharecroppers who rolled through what was then the world's busiest railroad terminal, enriching Chicago with the musical gifts that traveled with them. And a jukebox in every corner bar—that illustrates the importance of electricity.

"Electric lights, found only in the towns when Muddy was growing up, were spreading to the country," Palmer writes. Soon jukeboxes were "becoming the rage, not just in downtown taverns but in country stores and even in little juke joints like Muddy's." In 1940s Chicago, where jukebox manufactures like Wurlitzer ran the game, music was everywhere. Liquor stores doubled as blues clubs. Record stores like the Maxwell Radio Record Company sold vinyl in front and cut acetates in makeshift studios in back, documenting the crucial moment when Chicago, now the progenitor of its own "urban blues" sound, became the most important outpost for the musical traditions born along the Delta.

Sparks flew across the city. On Maxwell Street, an area along the Near West Side known as the Ellis Island of the Midwest, business owners allowed street musicians to plug amplifiers and extension cords into the power outlets inside, ensuring an electrified atmosphere throughout long afternoons. And no day was more important than Sunday, when Maxwell Street became a mile-long open marketplace, a tradition imported by the Jewish immigrants who settled into the neighborhood before Chicago's "black belt" increased in scope. The mix of sights and cultural offerings—bargain hunting in the pushcarts, dropping coins during a hat-pass for more gutbucket blues—made the street, for a time, a treasure.

As a Chicagoan I remain embarrassed by the erosion of Maxwell Street. After surviving the highway expansion that swallowed adjoining communities in the late 1950s, residents were ultimately forced out after a campaign of encroachment by the University of Illinois at Chicago, which began in the 1960s and reached its peak in 2000. The original structures—and with them, the fabric of the neighborhood—were razed and replaced with a more upscale housing redevelopment and new marketplace that co-opted the basic framework of the original Maxwell Street buildings (a practice derided as "façadism"). This failure to preserve living history remains a black eye for the city. (With respect to those who call the new area home, we've all settled on historic grounds, I mean no personal ill will.)

Despite protests from defenseless residents throughout the 1990s–2000s, the excavators nonetheless rolled in. Musicians sang the blues among the rubble. Sidewalks narrowed to nothing. Life moved on. While the city has enjoyed pockets of prosperity and some genuinely uplifting public projects in recent years, most concentrated in the Loop, many can't shake the memory of Maxwell Street.

The city's living ties to the neighborhood's prime years took a significant hit this year when two of the last great Delta musicians, both of whom performed on Maxwell, passed away. Pinetop Perkins, a one-time member of Muddy Waters's band, died at ninety-seven in March, in Austin, Texas. Originally a guitarist, a knife attack at a juke joint in 1943 prevented him from lifting his arms to run the fretboard, though his mastery of piano keys earned him his nickname. David "Honeyboy" Edwards played the guitar for nickels alongside Robert Johnson in his early days and continued until his ninety-sixth year. In August, he died in his Chicago apartment, the day before he was scheduled to play an outdoor concert in Millennium Park. One of Honeyboy's indelible instrumentals remains "Maxwell Street Shuffle," an ode to an adopted home.

Fortunately, there is a reason again to celebrate Maxwell Street. This month Chicago-based Facets Video re-released Linda Williams and Raul Zaritsky's 1981 documentary Maxwell Street Blues on DVD. The film explores a relatively tranquil chapter in the street's 150-year history, capturing evanescent moments of street life on 16mm stock, lushly restored on this disc.

The film is free of the brink-of-doom undercurrent that dominates coverage of the neighborhood from the '90s on, when the wrecking balls loomed. It simply documents a vibrant community, agenda-free, allowing the viewer to drift from one corner to the next, guided only by the resilient voices of its inhabitants. A bus driver whose announcements flow into sermons ("Be of good cheer, the Happy Bus is here") drops the camera crew at the Maxwell Street Market, where they encounter a landscape of brick husks and empty lots teeming with vendors and blues players performing for pocket money. What's remarkable about the exchanges between the musicians and their audiences is the reliance on humor to grab attention. The strumming and snare hits are loose, but the collections are mandatory. Inside the shops, the Jewish clothing clerks who blow cigar smoke into the merchandise slip a laugh into their sales pitch, and a new customer is hooked. Cash registers, we're reminded, make music, too. In one interview, a proprietor recalls the neighborhood's ancestry, claiming Maxwell Street was where you went for everything from "socks to lox." (A South Side–centric speller could opt for "Sox to lox.") Blind Arvella Gray pins a paper cup to his shirt so collections don't interrupt his guitar playing. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The filmmakers' coverage of the community is consistently respectful, whether they're lingering on crosstalk on the sidewalks or capturing acoustic testimonials in the quiet apartments overhead. Jim's Original, birthplace of the Maxwell Street Polish sausage, beckons in several street shots, triggering relief that its steamy sliding-glass service doors remain open for business, albeit dislodged from their original location after the university squeeze. (In Ira Berkow's book Maxwell Street, owner Jimmy Stefanovic explains that the store serves around-the-clock to minimize theft, and to encourage all customers—milkmen in the morning, truckers on late shifts—to stop by for a pork chop.) In one striking sequence, Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart, another business that has survived several moves, offers a brief tour of vital blues recordings by the likes of Papa Charlie Jackson, Robert Nighthawk and Little Walter, simply by snapping up records from his bins like a lottery drawing. Those records, like this film, deserve placement in any collection.

To view this restored 16mm footage is to be reminded of the technical advancements that have helped preserve the ideas, customs and anxieties that migrated from the South to the South Side and beyond, from field recordings made as far back as 1924 using portable disc cutters and equipment that filled entire car trunks to a slim DVD that resurrects the bygone bazaar of Maxwell Street, where the raw sounds from the Delta were electrified.

When Muddy Waters came to town in 1943, he brought what he called a grittier, rustier sound, and it was the amplified jolt of "I Can't Be Satisfied" in 1948 that remains a turning point. The combination of bottleneck blues and an electric guitar connected with Mississippians who'd left home, and introduced a new sound Chicagoans couldn't shake. "For stark power," writes Mark A. Humphrey in Nothing But the Blues, "Waters never exceeded these early [recordings], which seem to gaze into his past (and that of fellow Delta migrants), not with nostalgia, but with a stunning passion." That passion consumed the B-side of his first hit record, a song titled "I Feel Like Going Home." He'd already arrived.

Clips courtesy of Facets DVD.