Talk:Chicago blues

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject Illinois, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Illinois on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page to join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Stub	This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.

Chicago Portal

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Chicago, which aims to improve all articles related to Chicago.

Stub

This article has been rated as Stub-class on the quality scale.

Mid

This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Can anyone explain the difference in Chicago blues and Detroit blues? Neither article contains enough detail to tell the difference. Rmhermen 18:53, Mar 19, 2004 (UTC)

Here's a story that adds some background regarding development of the Chicago blues. While writing "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited" I interviewed a blues historian in Drew (Sunflower County) and was told of a 1923 all-night gunfight in downtown Drew, a small town near the Dockery plantation that featured a busy blues alley. (Dockery had established his plantation in 1895, when the Delta was still a wilderness, by clearing and planting forty square miles of land near Drew and Rulville and employing hundreds of black agricultural laborers and sharecroppers. Henry Sloan, who in the 1890s began experimenting with new musical patterns on his guitar, was hired by Dockery and in 1897 the Patton family, including a sixteen-yearold son, Charley, moved to Dockery's.) Joe Pullen had returned to Drew from WWI and the veteran was in no mood to be taken advantage of. Hence, Pullen killed a Drew planter in an altercation over a pay dispute. A relative of Archie Manning participated in the all-night gun battle that ended when a machine gunner from nearby Clarksdale loaned his equipment to the sheriff's posse. Perhaps dozens of townfolk were killed and wounded before Pullen was taken down by the machine gun. Soon the town's sheriff announced a 7 p.m. curfew that included bluesmen and their jukes. For several days the curfew was followed but then the music started up again into the early morning hours. The sheriff and his "deputies" (night riders) tore into the jukes and shot a number of musicians. A day later, suitcases were packed by many of those surviving "Drew tradition" musicians who headed out for Chicago. Susan Klopfer 67.137.247.153 12:34, 14 October 2005 (UTC)