Film shows Chess brothers’ moves that popularized blues

When Muddy Waters traveled to Chicago to play for Chess, he wasn’t looking to become Grandmaster. He was there to catapult the local record company to the forefront of 20th century music. “Who Do You Love”

Screened by JFilm: The Pittsburgh Jewish Film Forum

SouthSide Works Cinema

Thursday 7 p.m. (90 minutes)

$8 for Pitt students, must be purchased by the end of today at JFilmPgh.org

412-992-5213

When Muddy Waters traveled to Chicago to play for Chess, he wasn’t looking to become Grandmaster. He was there to catapult the local record company to the forefront of 20th century music.

Muddy Waters, a now-legendary bluesman, was one of the first artists to record for Chicago’s first blues record label, Chess Records, during the early 1950s. The rise of the label and its artists is the subject of “Who Do You Love,” an independent film to be screened by JFilm: the Pittsburgh Jewish Film Forum.

It is fitting that a film about the famous blues label should be shown by a Jewish film house, said JFilm chair Iris Samson. The story of two immigrant boys who loved blues and the artists who would influence modern music is both unlikely and inspiring, Samson said.  But Samson said, “Just as you don’t have to be Italian to enjoy ‘The Godfather,’ you don’t need to be Jewish to enjoy ‘Who Do You Love.’”

For Chicago musicians like Nathan Davis, Pitt’s director of jazz studies, the founding of Chess Records was an important landmark in a time of unprecedented musical and social change in Northern cities.

“It wasn’t just a local company. It was known all over. They shipped records to the south. They were big,” Davis said.

During the first half of the 20th century, more than 2 million black people fled widespread racism and lynching in the South and moved to Northern cities seeking industrial jobs. This huge population shift, called the Great Migration, led to the growth of a vibrant black community in, among other places, Chicago’s South Side. The new arrivals brought with them musical styles like blues that had never been heard in the North before.

In the late ’40s, the Chess brothers, Phil and Leonard, arrived in Chicago from their native Poland. They bought a popular nightclub in a bad neighborhood in the South Side, fixed it up and opened what became known as the Macomba Lounge. Like other clubs in the area they featured local black musicians, many of whom played blues. Leon Dorsey, Pitt’s coordinator of jazz studies, said the Chess brothers soon acquired a lifelong love for the blues and developed working relationships with many of the city’s best bluesmen and women, eventually buying other clubs as well.

“They went out and recruited people from the South Side and other places and brought them back to the studio,” Dorsey said.

But blues musicians had trouble getting heard outside of Chicago, as big band jazz remained the dominant musical form in the rest of the country. Dorsey said that blues music wasn’t getting radio playtime because “blues artists didn’t get on big labels, so blues didn’t get on the radar screen.”

The Chess brothers saw an opportunity to market the artists that had been playing in their club. In 1950, they purchased and renamed a record label, creating Chess Records. In their early years, the brothers focused mostly on blues, featuring many of the artists that had played at the Macomba.

“I remember hearing guys talking about going up to Chess to do a session,” Davis said, adding that the South Side musicians often worked as backup guitarists or drummers for the label’s bigger names. As part of the social and music scene, Davis said that the recent Jewish immigrants “were accepted as part of the community” and that their contributions to the South Side culture “transcended race, religion” or any other boundaries.

After the label quickly signed the now-legendary Mississippi bluesman Muddy Waters, the brothers began extending their reach beyond the South Side.

Davis said that for aspiring blues musicians from across the country, “Chess Records was the place to record.” Dorsey said that by introducing blues to the increasingly tolerant white listeners of the North, Chess Records soon began gaining popularity over traditional “race records,” which marketed black musicians exclusively to black audiences.

The Chess brothers’ success had as much to do with their talented performers as it did with their business sense. Using their nightclubs, the label and their connections to Chicago’s music scene, Dorsey said that they were able to create a “one-stop-shop for blues musicians.”

The brothers actively recruited blues musicians with new styles to record. To help the musicians pay their bills until their records were released, the brothers would arrange shows for the artists at one of their nightclubs. And when the albums were released, the brothers used their connections to persuade conservative radio station managers to give their blues artists airtime. The brothers even started a separate imprint, Checker Records, to increase the amount of airtime they could negotiate. And the music world began to listen. Early rock ’n’ roll artists like Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton began picking up records by Chess, which had now signed such figures as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf.

And as the music world evolved to incorporate blues, Chess Records evolved too. The label began recording artists from diverse genres, including soul, jazz and rhythm and blues. Yet Chess Records still remained what Dorsey called the “who’s who of blues music.” He argues that the brothers’ recording was so prolific and crucial to blues that one could “look at blues solely from Chess Records’ catalog.”

Chess Records’ story has been celebrated before. Beyoncé Knowles co-executive produced “Cadillac Records” in 2008, a movie which focuses on the musicians who played for the label. The Chess brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as non-performers in 1995.