By Rosalind Cummings-Yeates
A HOME FOR THE BLUES?
“Chicago Beau” Beauchamp
C
hicago is a world class city with a
wealth of culture. Millions of tourists
pour in to experience the food, the history, the architecture and the music. The music
is a key component. Chicago boasts a handful
of clubs to hear jazz and blues but most of the
historic spots are gone. Visitors can go to a
venue to hear live blues but where will they
learn about it? The original Maxwell Street
Market, with its sidewalks steeped in history,
open air vendors and live blues performers,
no longer exists. Muddy Waters house stands
vacant and dilapidated. Legendary blues
joints like Theresa's Lounge, Silvio's and The
Checkerboard Lounge are no more. For years,
Chicago has suffered through the embarrassment of not having a museum dedicated to its
significant heritage as the Home of the Blues.
Finally, that will change with the opening of
the Chicago Blues Experience, an interactive
cultural venue that will feature high tech
exhibits, memorabilia, live performance
space, restaurants and a foundation dedicated
to working with Chicago Public Schools and
other groups. Projected to open in 2017 on
Navy Pier, the facility will uncover the extensive cultural history and dynamic energy of
blues and all of its elements.
“It's all very serious business. The motivation is to put on a global scale the heritage of
Chicago blues and all that it helped create,”
said Lincoln “Chicago Beau” Beauchamp, cofounder of the Chicago Blues Experience and
noted blues musician, publisher and writer.
“Blues is more than music. If you're going to
dedicate a space to this culture, it can't be
16 illinoisentertainer.com december 2015
done in a little house in Kenwood.”
The project aims much higher than the
small scale that local blues initiatives have
been typically relegated to. The estimated cost
for the facility is $45 million and industry
masterminds like Terry Stewart, who headed
Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
BRC Imagination Arts, the firm that designed
the exhibits at the Lincoln Museum in
Springfield, are all on board along with an
impressive list of artists and advisers. It's an
exciting and long overdue institution that
Chicago Beau has been working toward most
of his life.
Growing up on the South Side and later
the West Side of the city, Beau listened to the
radio a lot and in 1959, decided that he would
be a blues musician. “I heard “I Need Your
Loving Everyday” by Don Gardner and Dee
Dee Ford and that was it for me. I was born to
be a blues singer.” Beau started sneaking into
the legendary 708 club on 47th St and heard
everyone from Howlin Wolf and Muddy
Waters to Big Mama Thornton and Little
Walter. Billy Boy Arnold gave him harp lessons and Muddy Waters gave him his name,
Chicago Beau. Deepening his musical connections, Beau's father was an attorney who represented prominent musicians including
Ahmad Jamal and Eddie Thomas. Beau
played harp and sang in clubs for years, as
well as in Ontario mining camps and in the
streets of Montreal and Amsterdam. He officially started his career in 1969 at 20-yearsold, when Archie Shepp invited him to Paris
to record on his album Blase.
“My dad had his law office right next to
the Regal Theater on 47th St,” said Beau. “I
would look out the window to see people
lined up to see Ray Charles. Jitney cabs would
be running up and down the street.
Everything you could want in a community
was there; 47th street was orgasmic. These cats
making reference to it now don't know what
they're talking about. I was there. That's why
I'm setting the record straight.”
That record will include how blues culture
extends to a lived experience including movement, style and literature. The museum will
illustrate how blues moved beyond the
Mississippi Delta and spawned art forms
around the globe. “The CBE will be a 21st century experience including West African,
Senegambia, to Solomon Burke, from the
Sounds of Philadelphia to New Orleans. All of
these sounds come from the blues experience.
It doesn't have to be limited to 12 bars and
approved by Chess Records to be considered
blues. There's a whole lot more to blues and
that's the story we're telling with the CBE. Just
like the Aztecs or the Tibetans, this culture has
contributed to the world,” he explained.
Chicago Beau has performed for over 40
years, all over the world and with blues legends including Sunnyland Slim, Billy Boy
Arnold, Johnny Shines and Willie Kent. He
published the literary aspect of blues culture
by founding Literati Internazionale publishing company (15 books, magazines and journals to date that have featured writers including Margaret Walker, Henry Miller and Amiri
Baraka.) and Chicago Blues Annual, a collection of the collector's items was published in
2010 as The Best of the Original Chicago Blues
Annual by the University of Illinois Press.
Beau's lived blues experience will be translated to the CBE and help visitors feel and understand what blues culture is really about.
“We're not competing, but if we can be
compared to anybody, it will be the Louvre.
That's the scale we are looking at.” he said.
“We will have multilingual translations, live
music, film, theater, every aspect of the creative experience will be featured because the
blues experience is one and the same. CBE and
the foundation have a philosophy of inclusiveness,” he said. “It