Chicago blues; what most of the world missed after the 60s.

There was a short blues revival in the early to mid-1960s in which Al Wilson a white musician of blues rock group Canned Heat, and the Newport Folk Festival played the key roles. According to Dick Waterman (Francis Davis, The History of the Blues, New York: Hyperion, 1995) Al had to help Son House, an alcoholic blues singer of the 1948-64 period, to relearn his old songs in order to be able to perform at the Festival:

A month or so [after his "rediscovery"], we brought Son to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get him ready for the Newport Folk Festival [and introduced him to] Al Wilson. [...] Al played opentuning bottleneck and could play all the styles. He could play Bukka White, Son House, Charley Patton, and Blind Lemon Jefferson — he could really play. And he sat down with Son, knee to knee, guitar to guitar, and said, "Okay, this is the figure that in 1930, you called 'My Black Mama,'" and played it for him. And Son said, "Yeah, yeah, that's me, that's me. I played that." And then Al said; "Now about a dozen years later, when Mr. [John] Lomax came around, you changed the name to 'My Black Woman,' and you did it this way." He showed him. And Son would say, "Yeah, yeah. I got my recollection now, I got my recollection now." And he would start to play, and the two of them played together. Then, Al reminded him of how he changed tunings, and played his own "Pony Blues" for him.

There would not have been a rediscovery of Son House in the 1960s without Al Wilson. Really. Al Wilson taught Son House how to play Son House.

However with the emergence of Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield and the Butterfield Blues Band electric blues was forgotten by the mass media and lost its audiences again. The Newport Folk Festival had to be called off after 1970 and when they buried Hubert Sumlin in December 2011 at Washington Memory Gardens Cemetery in Homewood Barely 30 people showed up at the funeral of a bluesman who left Chicago years ago, dying in New Jersey at age 80. In a recent article Chicago Tribune lamented that:

Chicago, unfortunately, has turned its back on this music. While jazz thrives in clubs and concert halls, while classical music flourishes in citadels such as Symphony Center and the Civic Opera House, while alternative rock shakes up music rooms across the city, the blues barely registers on the city's cultural consciousness. Unloved by funders, infrequently backed by City Hall, barely championed by its own organizations, the blues has been left to fend for itself in a harsh local environment.

and here is a sample of  what will be lost:

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield, in the tiny hamlet of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, on April 4, 1915. At the age of three he lost his mother and was raised by his maternal grandmother, who gave him his nickname. At the early age he became a farm laborer and like many others was drawn to music to lessen the harsh adversity of life and by the age of thirteen he finally got himself a harmonica. But after couple of years he was attracted to the "bottleneck" style of guitar which could accompany his voice, complementing the nuances of its rhythmic harmony as it is articulated in singing the blues, thus at the age of seventeen Muddy made the switch to guitar.

Over the next ten years inspired by Robert Johnson's blues in the Mississippi Delta Muddy was singing and perfecting his powerful style with a sorrowful voice enriched by his soulful and unique expression. After recording for Library of Congress' folksong archives in 1941 which revealed his mastery of Delta bottleneck guitar. Blues began as the music of black sharecroppers in the poor cotton-farming region of the Mississippi Delta, and traveled north to Chicago with the sharecroppers as thousands of them moved north in search of a better life. In Chicago, the emergence of blues culture in the 1920s coincided with increased musical performance and recording nationwide and paralleled the dramatic growth of black urban enclaves during the Great Migration. Muddy followed this trend moved to Chicago in 1942, adopted his nickname and switched to the electric guitar, and revolutionized urban blues. Songs like "Rolling Stone" and "Mannish Boy" recorded in the late 40's with Chess Records set a new standard and modern Chicago blues was born!

Muddy cobered many of Willie Dixon's songs and made them major blues hits, especially "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "Got My Mojo Working". Other artists who played with Muddy sound like a Hall of Fame roster of blues greats: Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, James Cotton, Little Walter, and Jimmy Rogers. But when you start talking about the "Hall of Fame", Muddy Waters is the first inductee--his music forms the roots of Chicago blues!