Rosenberg: Correct. Jobs of a particular kind, too, it's important to recognize. Chicago was not a town where everybody would get rich, like New York. But Chicago was a town where everybody could work. So this is a city of working people. Typically in the second generation of settlement here, people would move away from their traditions. But at some point it became apparent that something important was about to be lost. There's a little-known law of folklore — I don't know whether you're aware of this — that when people leave their culture of origin and settle in another place, the culture is stopped dead at the time they leave and preserved at that point. These groups, from the Irish onward, realized that there was something intrinsically valuable about maintaining a connection. And so from the very beginning, Chicago has been a center for the preservation of cultural traditions.

Look, for instance, at the great Irish tradition. The great bulk of the Irish who came here immigrated after the famine in the late 19th century. By 1900 it was apparent that their culture was going to be lost unless it was preserved. So Francis O' Neill, who was chief of police at the turn of the century, decided he would make it his personal task to record all of the fiddle tunes of all the fiddle players in Chicago's Irish community. And he did so in a collection called O'Neills Book of Irish Fiddle Tunes. The Irish fiddle tunes that O'Neill wrote down at the turn of the century stopped being played in Ireland. So when Irish fiddle players of today want to learn the really cool old tunes, they come to Chicago.

G: Why did this music stop being played?

R: Because culture is dynamic. Culture's based on style and fashion. But when you displace it and put it in another place, it takes on a different set of values.

In a city like Chicago, culture acquires a dynamism that's unmatched. Within the context of all these ethnic communities you find the traditional culture influenced by contemporary culture. It's a synergy between contemporary cultural values and the power and weight of tradition. They come together and explode in ways unimaginable. One of the great examples, of course, is Chicago blues. The culture of rural black America from the deep South ran smack into the energy and the power of 1950's urban America. These guys came up here and tried to get work in little funky clubs playing acoustic guitar and they got laughed out. "You've got to play an electric guitar and you have to have a band." This was something that didn't exist back on the plantation where they came from. But they said, "If that's what I got to do, that's what I got to do." And ten years later we have the Chicago Blues — literally, ten years. The fact of the matter is within ten years after the displacement of rural black America from the South to the North, this new form, this new way of experiencing the black American tradition, began to make itself heard. And after it starts making itself heard in the 1950's, it wasn't long before it started having a profound influence on the London scene, especially the people from Liverpool. These people were hearing that stuff on records before it made it on the radio.

1  |  2  |  3