sweartotellthetruth

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, August 30th (1:00 to 2:30pm)

This show follows the development of blues in Chicago after 1945. Before World War 2, Chicago was the place where a great deal of blues recording took place and where there was a ready audience for blues performers. You might say that a Chicago blues style developed in the thirties but you likely wouldn’t refer to “Chicago blues” in the 1930s because Chicago was the hub of the blues industry with only New York, less of a blues city, as competition in terms of a recording centre.  In a sense, the rise of independent record companies decentralized recording and encouraged the development and marketing of local styles after the war. The new Chicago electric blues seem like an expression of an era of heavy industrial development in the U.S. midwest from Chicago and surrounding cities in the region. Before the war Lester Melrose recorded artists from Mississippi with down-home appeal, like Arthur Crudup and Tommy McClennan, for Bluebird but what was sometimes disparagingly referred to as the “Bluebird Beat” was a danceable swing blues that was devoid of much regional sense and the repeated use of the same session musicians tended to reduce the individuality of perfrmances on record. The new “Chicago” blues made its appeal to a narrower segment of the population and a Mississippi or Deep South sensibility.

On the Show:

Nature Boy Brown – Jazz Gillum – John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson – Muddy Waters – Bay Face Leroy – Grace Brim – Johnny Shines – Big Boy Spires – Floyd Jones – Snooky Pryor – Raoul & the Big Time & others

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton, live on Cogeco Cable 288 or on CFMU online at cfmu.msumcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or download until September 27th.

Contact Us:

To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.

You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.

Next week (September 6th)

Next week is Welcome Week at McMaster. This year, we will be broadcasting from the studio rather than the Atrium of the McMaster Student Union Building but we will be heard in the Atrium. Easier for the programmer. We’ll present a mix of all that we do week to week.

cmc.