CHICAGO — The old men paused as they filed past Junior Wells' coffin and glanced at the bluesman's final show of splendor: his creaseless sky-blue silk suit and matching homburg, a shiny trove of harmonicas laid out beside him, a pint of gin nestled nearby to ease his journey home.
The 63-year-old musician had been "Junior" all his adult life, and now that the youthful peacock was gone, the mourners knew their own time was coming.
Two of them murmured low as they returned to the last pew of the South Side funeral chapel where Wells lay in state. As the hall filled, Sebastian Jordan and Henry Taylor caught up on lost years.
They had met in the late '50s, in ghetto bars where the rhythmic hybrid of Mississippi music and urban experience known as Chicago blues was born. The two had been out of touch. When they ran into each other last month at Wells' funeral, it was a time to mourn not only the passing of one of their stars but also the way of life they once knew.
"Junior was hardly a grown man last I saw him," said Taylor, 77. "Tells you how old we are," Jordan, 64, whispered back. "Too many gray heads around here, too many. One of these days, there won't be none of us left."
When Arkansas-born Arie McDavid, 50, heard that Wells had died, she threw on a fur coat and hurried to the funeral parlor to see the bluesman one last time. As she made her way past his coffin, McDavid remembered a night 30 years ago when a friend dragged her to an inner-city club to see Wells play.
McDavid had been aching from an aborted love affair, but "the moment I heard that man play, I just snapped. I hadn't heard that sound since I was a child. It made me forget what I was crying about."
This is a twilight for the Southern-born migrants who spawned Chicago blues--both the musicians who developed the distinctive sound and the black audience who nurtured the music long before it captivated white listeners and became aural wallpaper for beer commercials and film soundtracks.
Chicago blues is now woven deeply into the fabric of American popular culture. But as its last generation of migrants passes into old age, there is growing concern about what will become of their legacy. Black businessmen are trying to revive Chicago's inner-city blues club culture. Archivists are turning their attention to the post-war migration and the culture it spawned here--as a social movement deserving of preservation. But there is uncertainty over who should be the caretakers and what should be saved, who should provide funding and who needs it most.
