CHICAGO _ "Dancing Aloud," a sign said. On stage, guitarist Corey Dennison, 43, white and well tattooed, had just opened an instrumental conversation with a grandfatherly figure in a White Sox cap.
"This is my old man, Mr. Carl Weathersby," Dennison told the crowd. "He taught me everything I know about the blues."
Weathersby, 65, and African-American, nodded. The notes rose, fell and tangled like family voices around a dinner table. The players, related only by a passion for music, grinned and winced the way soloists do.
In the audience 100 blues lovers roared, clapped, drank and chattered in three or four languages.
This was Kingston Mines, the oldest, biggest club of its kind in Chicago, on a recent Monday night. Like the rest of the international audience, I was here to listen to an embattled American sound _ Chicago-style electric blues, born in the mid-20th century as African-American families moved north from the Mississippi Delta.
In that migration, legions of country blues musicians traded their acoustic guitars for electrics, started playing their harmonicas through microphones and launched an era of rough-edged, streetwise music, sibling to soul, cousin to gospel.
The sound filled mostly black clubs on Chicago's South and West sides. New arrivals played for tips on Maxwell Street, and the biggest names released albums on Chess Records and blazed a musical path that rock 'n' roll soon would follow.
But Chicago and pop culture have moved on.
Though the vast, free Chicago Blues Festival takes over Millennium Park every June, and the locally headquartered Delmark and Alligator labels release new blues and roots tunes, rap music now dominates the South and West sides.
You must go to the Loop and north, where the tourists are, to find the remaining handful of all-blues clubs.
I wanted to see and hear them before things changed any more, so I spent three days and nights this summer chasing Chicago blues through five clubs, one museum exhibition and one storied old studio.
