📍Hastings Street, Detroit, MI, USA
1943 – 1955“I was born in Mississippi, in the Delta near Clarksdale, the son of a sharecropper and Baptist preacher who only allowed gospel music in the house. My stepfather, Will Moore, taught me the guitar and his driving, one-chord style, and I left home young, working my way north through Memphis and Cincinnati. In 1943 I came to Detroit, where the car factories were hiring, and I settled in Black Bottom, the city's Black neighbourhood on the near east side, around Hastings Street. Hastings Street was alive with music day and night: bars, clubs, shoeshine stands, barber shops, record stores and rent parties. By day I worked as a janitor in the auto and steel plants, pushing a mop and broom, and at night I picked up my guitar and played at house parties and clubs all over Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. I played at Henry's Swing Club and anywhere else that would have me, stomping my foot to keep time. I had my own sound, a hypnotic boogie, and the people loved to dance to it. In September 1948, at the United Sound Systems studio in Detroit, I recorded Boogie Chillen', a song about walking down Hastings Street and hearing the music at Henry's Swing Club, and by January 1949 it was the number one rhythm and blues record in the country, the first down-home electric blues to get there. I went on to record Boom Boom and Crawling King Snake, and much later The Healer. In the early 1960s the city tore down Hastings Street to build the freeway, but Boogie Chillen' keeps it alive.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today