You can't find the blues on radio very easily these days, unless you hunt low down on the dial in the small hours of the morning.

Same with TV -- a vast wasteland, as far as real blues is concerned.

Record stores -- remember those? -- no longer can champion the music as they once did. And while decades-old Chicago labels such as Alligator and Delmark ambitiously release recordings, they hardly can be heard in an industry that generates less than 1 percent of its sales from the blues.

Which has to make even the most ardent lover of the music wonder: Can the blues endure? And even if it does, will it remotely resemble the raw, gritty sound of its origins?

More than a few musicians still playing believe there's life yet in a music that opened the door to jazz and set the stage for rock and rap, hip-hop and R&B. But as the city gears up for the 28th annual Chicago Blues Festival, Friday through June 12, Chicago's blues artists know fully well that they face struggles.

"I had some big dreams when I got into this business," says Chicago singer Shemekia Copeland, at 32 one of the great hopes for the music, thanks to the sheer size of her voice and the majesty of her delivery.

"My big dream was to make blues music mainstream. ... I wanted to do it because I'm so passionate about the music. I love the music so much, and I think it has a right to be just as big as, say, country music is. But, unfortunately, we just don't have the resources."

Thus the blues exists on the margins of American cultural life, a quaint reminder of what once was, a sound with a colossal history, a diminished reality and a tenuous future. If the blues is as vital as Copeland believes, if the legacies of Robert Johnson and Son House and Charley Patton (and scores more) are to endure, the blues has to be heard.

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Shemekia CopelandBut the infrastructure of music in America -- the ways in which sounds are disseminated online, through the airwaves and via cable -- gives little push to any musical genre that doesn't already command massive sales. A music as steeped in history as blues does not fare well in this setting.

"Why is the blues marginal? Because in America, everything is about what's new, what's new, what's new," says Copeland, daughter of the late blues-guitar master Johnny "Clyde" Copeland. "They don't respect old people, they don't respect anything old. And it irritates me when I go to other places (such as Europe) and I see how they treat things, and how much they respect things.

"Here, it's like: Who's got the new album? Who's got the No. 1 thing? When's the new iPod 6 coming out?"





CHICAGO BLUES -- NOW

This is the first segment in a four-part series about the Chicago blues scene.

Part 2: Blues 101: A new generation tries to learn | Photos | Video

Part 3: Playing the blues in black AND white | Photos | Video

Part 4: Is this the twilight of blues music? | Photos | Video





If Copeland sounds piqued, perhaps she has a right to be, for she's fighting for a monumental musical legacy practically ignored by the country that produced it.

Like Copeland, veteran Chicago singer-harmonica player Billy Branch -- a generation older -- also bristles at the neglect accorded this music, which is why he has been bringing it into the Chicago public schools for more than three decades. His Blues in the Schools program has introduced songs of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Big Walter Horton to kids who otherwise wouldn't hear them.

"It's about cultural heritage -- that children don't know their past," says Branch, 59. "I have talked to every ethnic group on the planet. I've even done Blues in the Schools in Japan.

"But in the case of younger African-American children in the inner city, they have very little to hold on to, and a lot of times they come in, their heads are down and they look sad. This isn't all the time or across the board. But the main thing I try to impart to them is that this is your people's music, and without this there would be no Beyonce, there would be no Michael Jackson.

"This is something to be proud of. Your people gave birth to this music we call the blues."

The reason that knowledge matters, says Branch, has to do with the way race and blues have been inextricably intertwined in American history. The blues blossomed from the bloody fields of slavery. Ever since, the blues and the culture that created it have fought mightily to be heard.