Freddie King Plays Robert Johnson

Texas Cannon Ball, Freddie King plays “Sweet Home Chicago” at a European concert in 1973.

“Sweet Home Chicago” is a popular twelve bar blues standard, first recorded, and credited to have been written by Robert Johnson. Over the years the song has become one of the most popular anthems for the city of Chicago despite the vagueness of Johnson’s original lyrics.

Johnson did not live to enjoy national popularity. If he had become a star with a following in Chicago, he might have altered the chorus with its confusing geographical coupling. As it is, he succeeded in evoking an exotic modern place, far from the South, which is an amalgam of famous migration goals for African Americans leaving the South. To later singers this contradictory location held more appeal than obscure Kokomo. Tommy McClennan’s “Baby Don’t You Want To Go” (1939) and Walter Davis’s “Don’t You Want To Go” (1941) were both based on Johnson’s chorus, while later singers used Johnson’s chorus and dropped the mathematical verses.

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