Muddy Waters, widely considered the most important musician in the history of the genre, made his name in Chicago, as did such legends as Willie Dixon, Otis Rush, and Howlin' Wolf. Buddy Guy used his stature to open a wildly popular eponymous blues club in the South Loop. Chess Records, one of the seminal labels in the development of blues and early rock and roll, ran its operation out of offices in the Kenwood and Near South Side neighborhoods.

But for all the city has done for the genre, there's a reason people call it the Blues Capitol of the World and not Birthplace of the Blues: the music was actually born a thousand miles away in the heart of the Deep South. Down on the shores of the Mississippi Delta, musicians like John Lee Hooker and R.L. Burnside were refining the twelve-bar form in the 1920s while jazz still ruled Chicago. The crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil were not 79th and State but highways 8 and 3 between the towns of Cleveland and Ruleville, Mississippi.

Fundamentally, Chicago blues and Delta blues are essentially the same music, relying on similar song structures and chord progressions rooted in minor pentatonic scales. Stylistically, however, Chicago blues has long been seen as the more glamorous of the two with its reliance on predominantly amplified instrumentation and the addition of major scale notes into its often extended guitar solos.

Stylistic superficialities aside, the deeper question emerges of exactly how this happened. How did the roots music of the Magnolia State become the chief cultural export of the Windy City? Simply put, blues music and musicians had nowhere else to go.

At the end of World War I, social and economic factors meant significant changes for African-Americans across the south. Many southern states were already hostile towards people of color, most visibly and violently through the work of the Ku Klux Klan, but during the war there were at least opportunities for employment as white soldiers were shipped off to Europe. Once those soldiers came home, work was essentially handed back to the white residents who'd held those jobs before leaving. In the northern states, industrial growth along the so-called "Rust Belt" meant the money and opportunities were in places like Detroit, Cleveland and New York, rather than in the largely agricultural areas of the south.

As the largest and nearest city with more jobs than workers to fill them, Chicago for many represented a chance at a better life. Later events would prove the Windy City wasn't quite over its racial tensions, but compared to what was happening in the south it at least offered a glimmer of hope. The first major movement of African-Americans to the north became known as the Great Migration, with a second wave following a similar chain of events at the end of World War II.

Official records of the exact number of people displaced to Chicago weren't kept, but most accounts put the figure around 750,000. Beyond workers for the burgeoning industrial and tourism industries, the exodus to Chicago also brought with it a veritable who's who of blues icons: Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Kansas Joe McCoy and Willie Dixon, to name a few. Each was a child of the Deep South, but all became the famous godparents of the new Blues Capitol.

At the same time, Chicago underwent some demographic and cultural shifts of its own. While the city had originally been designed with business and government dominating the Loop area in the center and most residents living on the South Side, the influx of African-Americans drove many white residents to the newly-developing areas on the North and West sides in Chicago's own version of "White Flight," although the lack of any real suburban area at the time meant there were very few viable options for relocation outside of city limits.

As more people came up from Mississippi and Tennessee, bringing the sound of the region with them, more and more venues opened up specifically catering to the blues and R&B of the south. Larger theaters, such as the Chicago Theatre, the Aragon and the Uptown wouldn't book blues acts, but a myriad of smaller clubs gave a stage and a microphone to the city's latest artistic imports. The Checkerboard, Gatewood's, and the 708 all grew to national prominence among blues fans and musicians. At the same time, the local talent pool was strong enough to support Chess and Vee-Jay, both widely considered to be the most important and most influential blues labels ever established.

But with time, the city's relationship with the music changed drastically. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the rapid development of the North Side coupled with the systematic municipal neglect of the South and West sides by Mayor Richard J. Daley put cultural advancements on the back burner in favor of land deals and reshaping the city. The Englewood and Kenwood neighborhoods, which for decades had been hubs of local blues music, became the sites of repeated showdowns between police and residents; many of the clubs and venues that made the city famous were effectively shut down through redistricting and new taxes, while Chess and Vee-Jay both folded altogether.

These days, blues music in Chicago stands as more of a tourist destination or a postcard centerpiece than an expressive ideal. Since 2002, the South Loop area where Buddy Guy's Legends opened up has seen a rapid turnaround from its 1970s Skid Row appeal. Lincoln Park, once home to a stretch of dedicated blues clubs that hosted "rent parties" for struggling musicians, has since redefined itself in terms of martini bars and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The Chicago Blues Festival has been an annual tradition in the lakefront Grant Park since 1984, but it's hard to talk about disenfranchisement when people are flying in from around the world for the event and paying $6 for hot dogs.

But away from the fireworks shows and festival banners, in the dives in Uptown and the clubs downtown, the barrios on the West Side and the saloons on the South Side, you can still hear the 12 bars shuffling and the I-III-V basslines, someone's woman left him and someone's man's been no good. Faces and places change but night in and night out, Chicago still sings that same downtrodden song.

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