Posted: 7/9/08 Section: Diversions

Media Credit: Caryn Rousseau, The Associated Press Blues musicians Ronnie Baker Brooks, left, and his brother, Wayne Baker Brooks, sons of blues legend Lonnie Brooks, perform in their basement on Feb. 12 in Dolton, Ill. Ronnie says the blues was more vibrant in the days when his father came to the Chicago area from Louisiana in 1959 and now the blues is in transition because a lot of the older blues musicians are passing on.

CHICAGO - Blues guitar virtuosos and honey-voiced singers filled the Chicago streets with music during the 1950s. Muddy Waters' guitar seeped from corner juke joints. Willie Dixon strummed bass guitar beats, echoing the city's blues sound.

Now more than a half century later, a music that was born in the rural South and raised in the urban North, has grown old and tired. Its fan base is aging, key blues haunts have shuttered and some of its up-and-coming musicians are struggling. Nowhere is the decline more evident than in Chicago, arguably the city that made the genre famous.

At age 41, Ronnie Baker Brooks is a second-generation Chicago bluesman. His father, 74-year-old Lonnie Brooks, came to the city from Louisiana in 1959 and Ronnie has listened to his father's blues since he was a baby.

"It was a lot more vibrant back then," Ronnie Baker Brooks says. "(The blues) is in a transition because a lot of the older blues guys are passing on."

Those older blues musicians migrated north to Chicago from southern deltas in the 1930s through the 1960s, lured by industrial steel and automobile jobs as sharecropping jobs withered. The musicians brought with them an acoustic country blues that morphed in the big city, taking on the electrified sound of their new urban life.

Record Row popped up on south Michigan Avenue with labels like Chess Records and Vee-Jay Records. Blues dominated local radio stations. And music poured from clubs into the streets.

Marie Dixon, 70, widow of the late Willie Dixon, says parties started on Thursday and ended Sunday night.

"An evening out was the highlight of your life," she says. "You had good music, great people who were there just to feel the music. Blues was a part of your life."

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