Chicago's Aging Blues Scene Growing Tired

The decline is partly because national interest in the music waned -- and that's reflected in the city's club scene.

Blues guitar virtuosos and honey-voiced singers filled the Chicago streets with music during the 1950s. Muddy Waters' guitar seeped from corner juke joints. Willie Dixon strummed bass guitar beats, echoing the city's blues sound.

Now more than a half century later, a music that was born in the rural South and raised in the urban North, has grown old and tired. Its fan base is aging, key blues haunts have shuttered and some of its up-and-coming musicians are struggling. Nowhere is the decline more evident than in Chicago, arguably the city that made the genre famous.

So what's happened in the city known as the “Blues Capital" -- the town where “The Blues Brothers" was filmed, where musicians with names like Magic Slim played and Buddy Guy built his famous club, Legends? Chicago has earned itself a reputation as the place to hear the blues and the city that bred the blues.