Bright Lights, Big City

Despite its origins as a rural-route start-up, the Blues really delivered, electrifying itself and the world, in a northern city: the Windy one. Metropolitan Chicago is where, in the 1950s, the music got all charged up, with tube amps and floor toms and artists cutting for Chess, Chief and Vee-Jay Records. Mississippi expat Jimmy Reed does a slow-burn over the loss of his woman to the “Bright Lights, Big City.” Junior Wells warns those who'd jive him they'll live to regret “Messin' with the Kid,” and Otis Spann, who like Wells made noise in Muddy Waters' band, coolly crystal-balls it: “The Blues Will Never Die.”