Maxwell Street's Borrowed Power

Along here once sprawled an open air bazaar so loud with haggling and street vendors that the blues musicians working its corners had to invent an entirely new sound just to be heard over the crowd.

Maxwell Street Market grew out of the eighteen nineties as an informal marketplace set up by Jewish immigrants newly arrived from Eastern Europe, selling secondhand goods and discounted merchandise straight off tables and carts. By nineteen twelve the city had officially recognized the Sunday market, and it eventually spread across roughly nine square blocks centered near Maxwell and Halsted streets, a dense, noisy trading ground that drew shoppers from across the city.

In the nineteen thirties and forties, Black musicians who had migrated north from the Mississippi Delta began busking on these same blocks, playing the acoustic country blues they had carried with them. But acoustic guitars could not compete with a crowded outdoor market. So the musicians turned to electric guitars and amplifiers, and the shopkeepers whose storefronts they played in front of struck a practical bargain, running out electric extension cords so the musicians could plug in, since a crowd drawn in by music was a crowd likely to step inside and buy something.

That small, mutually useful arrangement between merchants and street performers did something much bigger than either side probably intended. It helped turn quiet, acoustic Delta blues into the loud, electrified Chicago sound that musicians like Muddy Waters carried from these sidewalks into recording studios, and from there into the foundations of rock and roll. The market itself has since been redeveloped, but the sound born from a few borrowed extension cords never stopped traveling.