Two white brothers from downstate Illinois owned one such record store. Lester and Walter Melrose, along with pianist brother Frank, were great fans of blues and jazz and quickly made contacts in the music business. Eventually, Lester became the premier talent scout for several of the major record labels and their “race” subsidiaries. He signed most of Chicago’s best-known prewar blues acts to RCA’s Bluebird label, Columbia, Vocalion and the other major Chicago players.
One of the greatest performers whom Melrose helped was Big Bill Broonzy. Over the course of a three-decade career, Broonzy played a variety of blues styles. In fact, he is often cited as a formative figure in the development of folk music and even jazz. He was born in Mississippi in 1893 and had been a railroad gang member and a preacher by his early twenties. However, it was sharp clothes and women he had on his mind when he went to Chicago to sing and play the blues. He cut several sides for Vocalion and other labels throughout the 1920s and 30s and performed at John Hammond’s stellar Sprituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in 1939. Even so, he held day jobs for much of his life, including stints as a Pullman porter, steel mill worker and college campus janitor. He took the janitor job in the 1940s, when his popularity had waned. Even though his own career had faltered at this point, he was generous about lending a hand to a new generation arriving in town at the time.
Two Polish brothers who had come to America in 1928 also got very involved with the 1940s wave of new blues talent, as well as subsequent waves. Phil and Leonard Chess started out in the liquor distribution business, which led to the ownership of several bars, which led to involvement in black entertainment. They had a club at Thirty-ninth Street and Cottage Grove called The Macomba, which featured top-name jazz and black pop acts such as Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstein. It was their involvement with a fledgling label called Aristocrat in 1947, however, that began the real story of their monumental contribution to American music.
Out of that involvement, they crossed paths with a Vicksburg, Mississippi native who was a bassist with a club act called The Five Breezes and was starting to do some session work and songwriting. Willie Dixon would go on to write some of the greatest classics of blues and rock & roll over the next two decades and thereby help shape American culture for the second half of the twentieth century.
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