Living Chicago Blues Volume Number 3

Living Chicago Blues was a landmark multi-volume series that Alligator Records issued in the late 1970s to document the city's then-overlooked second and third generation of blues players, pairing established club veterans with rising talent recorded for maximum grit. Volume Three gathers three distinct Chicago bands: the raw, soul-inflected guitar work of the Lonnie Brooks Blues Band, the deep postwar piano blues of Pinetop Perkins (longtime pianist for Muddy Waters) backed by guitarist Sammy Lawhorn, and the young, harmonica-driven Sons of Blues led by Billy Branch with guitarist Lurrie Bell, son of Chicago bluesman Carey Bell. The series as a whole is credited with capturing a vital, unglamorous slice of the Chicago blues scene just as many of its older originators were aging out, giving overdue vinyl exposure to musicians who worked the city's neighborhood clubs rather than the concert circuit. Brooks brought a Louisiana-bred, R&B-tinged guitar sound to the Chicago idiom, while Perkins represented a direct living link to the Muddy Waters band lineage. Branch and Bell, both still in their twenties at the time, represented the next generation carrying the tradition forward. Critically, the Living Chicago Blues series is regarded as one of the most important field-document style blues releases of the era, prized by blues historians and collectors for preserving performers who otherwise left thin discographies, and it remains a touchstone reference for the late-1970s Chicago blues revival.