Dem Old Grafton Blues

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Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

The blues was probably born in Mississippi before fanning out to St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., and Chicago early last century. Black migrants were scarce in Milwaukee in those years and nonexistent in Ozaukee County. However, Ozaukee became an unlikely mecca for blues musicians in the 1920s and ’30s through the strange story of Paramount Records. The label was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company, whose Grafton factory made phonograph cabinets. The company added a line of recordings as an incentive to phonograph buyers. They were thinking European ethnic music at first but soon perceived a market for blues among African Americans.

Chasin’ Dem Blues is a musical history tour in song and dance of Paramount and Wisconsin Chair of the blues and African American heritage and even of American railroads. It was trains that ferried blues performers from Chicago through Milwaukee and up to Grafton and trains that brought blues and black migrants from the Jim Crow South to the urban North.

The four cast members form a crack musical ensemble with multi-instrumentalists Eric Noden and James Scheider backing and supplementing the star performances—powerful vocally and physically—by Brandin Jay and Maiesha McQueen. The foursome stage a blues revue of famous numbers whose copyrights were filed 20 years after Paramount’s demise (“I’m a Man/Woman,” “Hoochie Coochie Man”) as well as material recorded for Paramount by seminal artists such as Son House and Ma Rainey. The performers enact haunting metaphysical blues and murder ballads, uplifting gospel songs of faith overpowering worldly oppression, bawdy Prohibition-era dance numbers and songs that transmute trouble into defiant joy.

Entertaining even with its inevitable blue motes and minor keys, Chasin’ Dem Blues is a scrap book of memory that allows writer-director Kevin Ramsey to remember out loud the heritage of African Americans.

Through March 22 at the Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St.