Who Were Chicago's Musicians? A Demographic Study of Musician Life from 1940 through 1979

In 1926, in a column for the _Chicago Defender_, pianist and bandleader Dave Peyton explained that, “The job makes the orchestra. If you lose the job and loaf a few weeks, you haven't any band. Our field is a narrow one. Your men can't afford to loaf long and the first bidder takes them away from you. The job is what you worship.” Peyton's assertion that musicians in Chicago were laborers is not lost on historians who have argued that African American musicians migrated from the South to Chicago to work as professional musicians. In addition, scholars characterize the vast amount of music that came out of Chicago in the early to mid-20th century as the result of musicians grinding out records, as Elijah Wald argues in _Escaping the Delta_, “as efficiently as the local slaughter houses processed hogs into sausage.” Yet, few studies attempt to understand who the musicians were exactly. Even fewer studies examine what it meant to the musicians' lives and their labor to live in a segregated city and belong to a segregated musicians union. Our project seeks to provide demographics that can fill in the gaps of the existing historiography. To this end, we conducted a census of Chicago's musicians using the records available in the American Federation of Musicians Union Death Files, from 1940 through 1979, collection. The resulting study reflects information gathered from 1,983 individual's files, or nearly 2/3rd of the entire Death File collection. The demographics provide answers to the questions: who were the musicians in Chicago? What were the racial and ethnic characteristics of the community? What role did the Great Migration play in shaping the musicians' community? Were there measurable health disparities among the white and the Black musicians? Were there measurable employment disparities between the white and Black musicians? What do the disparities teach us concerning segregation in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century?