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(return
to part 1)
It was the North Side club the Wise Fools
that launched the career of Big Time Sarah Streeter. A veteran
of the South Side, Streeter met Sunnyland Slim at the Wise Fools
in 1978 or '79. A friend of Sunnyland's "drags me up to
the stage," Streeter remembers. "Don't ask me do I
want to sing, they just dragged me up there!" Streeter sang
"Stormy Monday"; at the break, Sunnyland asked her
if she wanted to travel and record. She soon found herself on
a six-month European tour, and "from them on, I've been
going, going, going," she says.
Streeter, who also has a regular gig at Blue Chicago, says there
were few blueswomen working the North Side when she came along.
"The only singers up north were Koko Taylor and Lavelle
White. After I got in on the scene, it was three up there. I
was the one that made it really comfortable for the other lady
singers to come up there."
Zora Young, who had been a fixture at Blue Chicago before moving
on to other North Side clubs and the suburbs, likewise credits
Sunnyland with helping her make inroads into the blues-club scene.
Young was touring the chitlin circuit as an R&B singer when
she met up with the piano man.
"He kind of ushered me into the blues," she says. "I
think I was singing with him when I met [Chicago Blues Festival
organizer] Barry Dolins. I met Jimmy Dawkins, too. Jimmy Dawkins
took me out and put me on the show, and Jump Jackson took me
out. I wasn't making too much money with them, but they were
giving me exposure to the blues circuit."
Young and Streeter both acknowledge that black audiences and
white audiences react differently. "The chitlin circuit
was a black audience," says Young. "Black audiences
are verbal. They're hollering, 'Get on down,' or something like
that. White audiences, they may not holler at you, but they dance.
They go crazy and shake their stuff and enjoy themselves."
"A lot of my people are stuck on rap and funk and soul,"
says Streeter. "The white people are just really into the
blues. They come out and party, they sing, they dance. If you
go out there and act a fool with them in the crowd - which I
do - they get wild and crazy."
(continue
to part 3)
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