Dave Chamberlain

Just in time for the twentieth annual Chicago Blues Festival, author David Grazian takes a swing at the present state of modern blues in "Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs."

By spending countless hours inside Chicago's blues dens--from Blue Chicago to Kingston Mines to Checkerboard Lounge--talking to both patrons and musicians, Grazian scratches the core of modern blues, illuminating the story behind the city's commodification of culture.

"Chicago sociologists," explains Grazian, "have always been interested in studying the underbelly of the city. In the twenties and thirties, sociologists from the University of Chicago wrote great dissertations on jazz cabarets, brothels, and other urban dens of iniquity. I felt that I was working within Chicago's sociology tradition."

Grazian's quest for authenticity began innocently enough, with the various clubs serving as a place for Grazian to blow off steam while attending the University of Chicago. "The clubs were great weekend distractions--I was getting a Ph.D. in sociology, but over time I started to realize that there was a lot of sociology going on in those clubs. All the things that I was interested in studying--social interaction, race relations, commodification of popular culture--all that stuff was happening right there in the blues clubs, and I realized that was sort of the perfect laboratory to really study sociology."

Though the idea was nurtured by his love for the blues and the clubs, the University of Pennsylvania professor doesn't pander an affectionate ode to the Chicago blues. Grazian uncovers a world where white musicians have difficulty finding work and the local standbys are urged to stick with the nauseating standards, all in an attempt to bring tourists into the clubs. "Over time," he says, "I began to sort of discover that I was becoming disenchanted with the music."

Throughout the course of the book, Grazian unravels his own subtitle, arguing that--regardless of history--authenticity can only lie in the eye of the beholder. "Authenticity," explains Grazian, "isn't an objective quality inherent in objects, but rather it represents a value that we place in the things that we like. Authenticity is always something that we evaluate by drawing on stereotypes of what we think things ought to be like as opposed to the way they actually are. The search for authenticity is almost a hopeless dream."

(2003-05-28)

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