History of music in the American Midwest – The Telegraph

From Howlin’ Wolf and Dylan to Motown and EDM, the American Midwest became the cradle of modern music
The American Midwest has often been sentimentalised as the nation’s heartland. When it comes to American music, it’s certainly close to the truth. The Midwest has been America’s great engine of popular music, both developing its own styles and radically transforming those that came from other parts.
Perhaps the most crucial of these transformations took place in St Louis, Missouri and, most significantly, Chicago, Illinois. There, the blues – a form originating chiefly although not exclusively in the Mississippi Delta, and following black migration northwards – was urbanised into a harder sound that went on to be the cornerstone of rock and roll.
Chicago’s urban blues, pioneered before the Second World War by the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson, produced in the 1950s such giants as Muddy Waters, BB King and Howlin’ Wolf – all of them Mississippi-born. They were not only great artists; they provided a bridge between the blues and the R&B (rhythm and blues) music that fed into soul and funk, via labels such as Chess records. Curiously, their greatest influence on rock came via the 1960s “British invasion” acts who revered and imitated them, rather than directly.
Chicago would be the setting of another key transformation, when the East Coast’s disco movement became the basis for the electronic house sound. Started from scratch in the mid-1980s by a small group of club promoters and DJs, this also crossed the Atlantic to the UK, was re-exported to the US, and has since expanded into the vastly popular EDM (electronic dance music) genre.
EDM was also fed by the techno sound of Detroit, Michigan, created almost in complete isolation in the 1980s by friends Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson – a less acknowledged contribution from the city that famously gave the world Motown, and the forerunners of punk (The Stooges, The MC5). Michigan has continued to play a major part in the hardcore scene that followed punk.
Kansas City, Missouri, is as vital to jazz as Chicago is to the blues. Jazz is another form that originated in the southeast (in New Orleans, Louisiana) and evolved further north. It was here that the big-band music exemplified by Count Basie and his orchestra flourished, and here that Charlie Parker, as a leading exponent of bebop, helped revolutionise jazz into a music still unrivalled for experimentalism and virtuosity.
Of all the Midwest’s seeming musical/geographic anomalies, one of the most striking is Minnesota, that cool state on the northern border. Imagine the 1960s New York folk scene without Duluth native Bob Dylan, or urban music from the 1980s onwards minus Prince.
But again, there is a wealth of less celebrated yet vital history. The twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul gave America both an alternative rock band as influential as any other, The Replacements, and the godfathers of the alt.country/Americana scene, The Jayhawks (who in turn inspired Uncle Tupelo, of Belleville, Illinois, also home of techno’s Detroit Three.) If the roots tend to emerge from other regions, it is the Midwest more than anywhere that American music has grown its branches.
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