THE DIMINISHING RURAL RESIDUE OF FOLKLORE IN CITY AND URBAN BLUES, CHICAGO 1915-1950

The purpose of this paper is to trace the movement of blues from the rural South ("country blues") to the urban North ("city blues") and to explain the diminishing of the rural residue of folklore in city blues as it evolved into modern "urban blues." I will argue that the rural folkways that were part and parcel of country blues were at first modified in the new "city" setting, subsequently subjugated and sublimated in the modem "urban" context, and then increasingly (though never fully) forgotten by succeeding generations. Thus, city and urban blues (as offspring of country blues) reflected the conditioning of rural emigrants from the South to the city's new universe of experience. The paradigmatic case study for this argument is the movement of blues from its southern capstone and spiritual home, the Mississippi Delta, to Chicago, the blues capital of the urban North during the Great Migration and beyond. To comprehend the plenary dynamics of the country-to-city diaspora as examined in the Mississippi-to-Chicago migration will be to understand why and how the rural residue of folklore diminished in city and urban blues-not only in Chicago, but in Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, and other urban areas. Before examining why the residue of folklore in country blues was diminished in city blues as city blues developed into its urban successor, I need to discuss the blues continuum that I will use to delineate the changes that occurred in the blues. The continuum is: