Dixon was in the scene, connected to all the major players and all the hot trends. While the brothers hovered around the blues scene they could only get so close. Dixon was the Chess brothers’ right-hand man. By the time the name of the label was changed to Chess Records in 1950, the label’s stable included harmonica king Little Walter, guitarists Robert Nighthawk and Jimmy Rodgers and bass maestro Willie Dixon.Ī former boxer, Dixon was another Mississippi transplant and the architect of not only the Chess sound, but the post-World War II blues scene that continues to thrive today. “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home” convinced Leonard and Phil the blues were the way to go, and they gradually started letting Waters bring his sidemen and other musicians in to cut sides. In 1948, Waters cut two songs for Aristocrat that launched his career and established the Chess brothers as players in the music business. Bolstered by his new, amplified instrument, Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, married his native Delta blues style with the hard, electric soul of his new hometown. After a couple years driving trucks during the day and playing clubs by night, he was given an electric guitar. In 1943, he moved to Chicago, but his acoustic guitar and “country” style didn’t play as well. McKinely Morganfield was a hot commodity at the juke joints and house parties around Stovall plantation, but he thirsted for bigger success and escape from the cotton fields.

One of the emigrants was a Mississippi sharecropper who had been recorded in 1941 by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Five million African-Americans fled north to escape Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan in the second Great Migration. The timing for Aristocrat Records’ foray into “race” music couldn’t have been better. In the winter, the family brought their cow inside for warmth. Their father was a shoemaker and the family of five lived in one large cement-floored room with no electricity, running water or heat.

It was a far cry from the world the Polish immigrants born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz left. Instead of having the bands show up on Cottage Grove to play, they would show up at the Aristocrat offices several blocks down the street and record. Shortly after buying the Macomba, the brothers established Aristocrat Records as a way to record the musicians who played the lounge. The Macomba Lounge burnt to the ground in 1950, but the Chess brothers’ back-up plan was well underway. It was located in a rough black neighborhood known for prostitution and drugs, but within four years it was a prime haunt for both musicians and patrons. When his brother Phil got out of the Army in 1946, he went straight to work with his brother at the club. Leonard Chess’ motivation for buying the property on South Cottage Grove in Chicago that would become the Macomba Lounge was clear: he thought it would make money.

Chess records