Checkerboard Lounge

On a recent Wednesday night at Blue Chicago, a long-running club downtown, you had to elbow your way forward just to get past the doorman. Men and women in business suits — collars loosened, beers in hand — packed the place, barely leaving...

After a decade of uncertainty, Buddy Guy’s Legends finally has a new home – and it’s a lavish improvement on just about anything the venerable Chicago blues scene has ever seen. When the new space (above, with Guy) is unveiled......

On Nov. 22, 1981, the Rolling Stones paid tribute to black history at the Checkerboard Lounge on East 43rd Street. In town for concerts at the then-Rosemont Horizon, the famed rock group made a pilgrimage to the South Side, where their musical style and...

These days, Dar Lopez approaches the Riverwalk Blues and Music Festival with a degree of humility. It's rooted, perhaps, in the organizer's abiding respect for the event's late founder, Don Cohen, who inaugurated the all-day party in the parking lot of...

Chicago Tribune colleagues share their memories of Terry Armour When I met Terry Armour in December 1981, we were copy clerks in the Tribune newsroom, and I never would have dreamed this wacky guy from the South Side would turn out to be a multimedia...

When the 20th annual Chicago Blues Festival kicks off this week in Grant Park, tourists and blues aficionados who want to check out the authentic blues institutions around town will have to cross the Checkerboard Lounge off their list. The club, at 423...

The South Side of Chicago holds a sacred place in the evolution of American music, for jazz, blues and gospel blossomed in this part of the city through most of the 20th Century. Why the South Side? Because great waves of African-Americans migrated...

It's rough and gritty, raucous and raw and, at its best, a searing expression of life in this city. Part myth, part reality, the Chicago Blues are everywhere in this town - if you know how to listen. For though it's true that the heyday of the city's most...