Chicago blues, rock ‘n’ roll landmark easily overlooked

CHICAGO (AP) — As we make our way up the narrow, windowless, wooden stairway, we hear the jangly opening beats of The Rolling Stones’ “2120 South Michigan Avenue” playing from a portable speaker behind us. Our tour guide encourages us to “rub a little mojo” from the banister as we make our way up.

We’re visiting Chess Records on Chicago’s South Side, climbing the same set of stairs Mick Jagger and the rest of the band ascended during two days of recording in June 1964.

“This place changed music and the world,” says Janine Judge, the 60-year-old executive director of Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven, the nonprofit foundation that owns and offers tours of Chess Records since it opened to the public in 1997. “I still feel them all here every day.”

By “them all,” Judge essentially is referring to the canon of Chicago blues.

Some of the biggest, most influential artists and hits were recorded at Chess: Muddy Waters, “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”; Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode"; Bo Diddley, “Who Do You Love”; and Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightning,” just to name a few.

The blues originally moved north with Blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration. The style found a home in this industrial, working-class city.

Berry and Chess gave each other their first big break. Berry originally signed with Chess. Then, when he met Waters, he suggested he audition for Chess, and the label quickly rose to prominence as the go-to blues record label.

The Stones, who named their band after a Muddy Waters song, were steeped in that history when they made the studio a mandatory stop during their first U.S. tour nearly 60 years ago. They recorded 14 songs here, including the hit “It’s All Over Now,” the first-ever recorded...