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I think Vanessa should take this argument even further. The connection is far deeper and more specific than "a Southern musician brought the blues to the North". If you check the bios of the vast majority of influential Chicago electric blues musicians (I'm hard-pressed to think of an exception off the top of my head; any exceptions would be more recent performers, I believe), you'll find they came to Chicago from the South, generally Mississippi but Arkansas as well. Certainly, the originators of post-war Chicago blues were southern by birth and musical background, as were the "Bluebird Beat" artists of the 1930's who laid much of the urban foundation of the style. It was their response to the Big City in the North that altered their music. Does the fact that Muddy Waters plugged in his guitar and added a rhythm section and harmonica to his band take his music out of the realm of "Mississippi Delta Blues"? Certainly, blues istorians have differentiated between Delta and Chicago, so we think of Muddy's post-plantation recordings as "Chicago blues" rather than "Delta blues" per se. But if the geographical location and instrumentation changed, the melodies, lyrics, slide guitar, and indeed the "essence" of the music (a vague term, to be sure) all ring of the Delta. Vanessa is on the right track - you can take the blues out of the South, but you can't easily separate the South and the Chicago blues. Tom Bingham Mason 2042 School of Music SUNY Fredonia Fredonia, NY 14063 http://blog.myspace.com/mason2042
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