South Side Music Scene
South Side Music Scene
Sonny Blount arrived in Chicago in 1946. This chapter examines his initial years in the city, where musical work in different circumstances—show-club arranging with Fletcher Henderson at the Club DeLisa, session recordings for Leonard Chess’s Aristocrat label, self-recorded rehearsals with young bebop players, strip-club accompaniment in Calumet City—offered both hardship and extraordinary musical variety. Tracing Blount’s activities across various settings reveals how particular racial and spatial conditions affected different centers of musical production, how production at these sites addressed an array of social issues, and how one cohort of South Side musicians developed community ideals that ranged beyond conventional liberal notions of black leadership and progress. Despite the racial conflicts and economic challenges reshaping black Chicago, Sonny Blount and many of his colleagues experienced the early post–World War II years as a historical moment full of possibility.
Keywords: African American, Sonny Blount, Fletcher Henderson, Club DeLisa, Leonard Chess, Calumet City, bebop, South Side, urban, music scene
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
