David Grazian on

CONNING THE BLUES
SOCIOLOGIST EXPLODES THE MYTH OF THE AUTHENTIC HOLE-IN-THE WALL

In the blues clubs of Chicago, amateur jam sessions usually draw part-time musicians and open-mike moths, not sociologists working on Ph.D. dissertations. So when David Grazian, a local grad student in the late ’90s, showed up with saxophone in hand at one of B.L.U.E.S. Etcetera’s mid-week events, the staff was mildly amused. They recognized him as one of their regular barflies and even waived the participant fee.

To the audience that night, Grazian’s performance must have had a magical storybook progression: stage fright at first, then a series of off-key riffs ending with an in-tune solo, enthusiastic applause, and praise from the onstage host. But this was no American Idol fantasy.

Grazian was conducting ethnographic research for what would later become his first book, Blue Chicago. Today, he is an assistant professor of sociology in SAS. By dusting off his sax, the social science researcher was hoping to earn the trust of musicians, who until the jam session, had treated him like a groupie tourist. The ruse worked. “They began to see me as this budding musician,” he says. “Not a great one, but they felt that they had something to teach me.”

The breakthrough was just one of the many ways Grazian penetrated the nighttime world of Chicago blues clubs. Over the course of a year, he spent countless nights in seedy and trendy establishments, interviewing club managers, bartenders, patrons, out-of-towners, and eventually, the professional musicians. The goal was to understand how people define the authentic blues experience. Grazian admits it began as a personal quest when his own idealized image of the clubs was shattered.

As a graduate student, he regularly went to blues hangouts as “a respite from the drab world of university libraries.” One weekend night, while he relaxed in B.L.U.E.S., an announcer asked how many in the audience were from out of town. Everyone in the room cheered. “This was totally shocking to me,” he recalls. “I’d spent this whole time thinking that I’d been in a place with a lot of regulars—local Chicagoans. It was strange to realize that in these clubs I was completely surrounded by tourists.”

In this new light, Grazian began to notice more unusual things. The audiences were often middle-aged, white, and affluent. The performers were always working-class blacks. Merchandise, like lingerie bearing the slogan “Don’t stop now; I’ve got the blues!” started to seem more like souvenir trinkets.

Slowly, all of the issues the budding sociologist was studying at the University of Chicago began to come to life in the clubs. “The questions that I was interested in pursuing—like the nature of race relations in the post-Civil Rights era, the commodification of global culture, the nature of urban nightlife—were emerging,” he says. “And blues clubs became the perfect laboratory for studying these sorts of contemporary sociological processes.”

In Blue Chicago, Grazian argues that many of the seemingly authentic aspects of modern blues clubs are really just carefully crafted artifice. “Blues musicians will tell you that club owners often dictate what kinds of music the bands will perform, what kinds of clothes the bands will wear on stage, what the racial makeup of the group will be.”

One of the most perverse byproducts of this manufactured authenticity is “the set list from hell.” This was the term that one musician used to describe the repetitive list of blues favorites like Sweet Home Chicago, The Thrill Is Gone, and Mustang Sally. “For a lot of musicians, the central problem is that for blues music to remain commercially viable, it has to become ‘museumized,’” Grazian observes. “These musical styles have become embalmed in time. As one musician told me, ‘If you keep the blues in a straightjacket, it can’t evolve and it eventually dies.’”

Race is another albatross the clubs wear. “The lucrative downtown clubs will as a rule not hire white musicians,” explains Grazian. “The owners and audience feel that only African-American musicians properly represent the authentic blues experience.” This stereotype relegates white musicians to dilapidated establishments and unpopular mid-week slots. Because the practice is so pervasive, Grazian contends that it perpetuates a kind of mass-marketed prejudice that belittles black and white musicians alike.

Blue Chicago is subtitled “The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs,” and its author questions whether an unbiased authenticity is even possible. In what he calls the “sliding scale of authenticity,” blues aficionados constantly reevaluate what they consider to signify authenticity and shift their club allegiances in the process—say, from a touristy House of Blues to an upscale B.L.U.E.S. to a faux-ramshackle Checkerboard Lounge. “This search for authenticity leads one nowhere because we rely on very superficial determinants of what authenticity is in the first place.”

In a forthcoming article in the academic journal Qualitative Sociology, Grazian explodes the idea of authenticity even further, explaining that the blues clubs share many of the formal properties of a confidence game. Just as successful cons rely on elaborate staging, so too are the music performances based on a strategy of deception deployed by a number of actors. The club owners act as “operators,” funding the show, dictating the interior designs, and hiring the talent. With the help of PR reps and media boosters, the “ropers,” the prospective blues fan, or “mark,”
is drawn into the “big store.” There, the musician takes on the all-important role of “insider,” the person who gives a credible performance and convinces the mark of the authenticity of what is really a well packaged tourist experience.

The live-music racket is so successful for the same reasons that con games work: The audience desperately wants to believe the ruse—they want to be entertained. “The alternative would be disappointment and slight embarrassment with the whole affair,” Grazian writes.

The only time Grazian admits of a personal sense of embarrassment was during his performance on amateur night. When he left the stage, after squeaking and honking a foggy mess of notes, a local bandleader stopped him. “You’ve got some chops,” the musician told him. “You’ve obviously been playing for a while, and you’ve
got some jazz influences that I heard in there. Am I right?”

Somehow, the musician had confused Grazian’s out-of-tune improv with the complex harmonics of free jazz. The sociologist had conned the con man.

Ted Mann, C’00, works for the University of Pennsylvania Press.