Crowd control: how audiences make music.

• Author: Braun, Steve
• Position: On Political Books

One morning in 1998, I drove to a funeral home in Chicago's South Side to watch a crowd of aging bluesmen pay final tribute to harmonica great Junior Wells. Buddy Guy, who had played Chicago's fabled club circuit for years with Wells, was there, slumped down forlornly beside several wizened session men. Son Seals, another of the city's guitar legends, showed up with his head webbed by bandages, just two weeks after his wife had shot him in the face. The coffin was open, and someone had placed a pint bottle of rye and several blues harps next to the late Junior, who lay there looking stately in a powder-blue suit and derby.

Then, from a rear pew in the parlor, I overheard two elderly Mississippi Delta natives commiserating on their dying generation. "Too many gray heads around here, too many," one of them muttered. "One of these days, there won't be none of us left." As they talked, I realized their wistful conversation was the germ of a neglected story. For years, music writers and historians have fretted over the diminishing legion of elderly blues musicians, warning of the music's fading heritage. But the experts' obsession with artists alone has long shunted aside the seminal role that their original audience of Delta transplants played in nurturing the city's blues music.

The blues-loving African Americans who streamed north to Chicago before and after World War II were, indeed, crucial in the development of that city's world-famous strain of electrified R&B. They demanded louder music, partly because their noisy rent parties and clubs required amplification unnecessary in the Deltas hushed, isolated jukes. Electric instruments that were rare in Mississippi were easier found in Chicago's myriad music stores. And audiences whose tastes expanded to the blaring big bands of Count Basie and jump bands of Louis Jordan no longer had patience for the quieter acoustic blues of an older generation--just as today's rap fans snicker at 1960s soul music as tame and passe.

We're so accustomed to thinking of art as something that emerges from a creator's inner muse that we often overlook the critical interaction between artist and audience. While the growth of Napster has lately been hailed as the liberation of music consumers, still forgotten is the fact that record buyers have long exercised a subtle but enormous sway over their favorite musicians, influencing the songs they played and the styles they adopted. The recognition that the audience is...