Like a giant urban phoenix, Chicago rose from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871 to become a giant in architecture, arts and business. With its waterways and rail network, the city had been known as a public transit hub since the 1840s, but the shipping industry took precedence during the Great Reconstruction as the city strove to become bigger and better than before. By the turn of the 20th century, Chicago had become the most important transportation center in the United States. In his 1914 poem “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg dubbed the city a “gambler with the railroads and freight manager of the nation.”

Around the same time, Chicago had also become an epicenter of musical instrument manufacturing. Raw materials such as wood and metals came to the city and were transformed by companies such as Lyon & Healy, Washburn Guitars and Kay Musical Instruments – all of which remain popular today and are still present in the area of Chicago – before being shipped to retailers and consumers around the world.

In this sense, Chicago has played a role not only in shaping the sound of popular music for over a century, but also in who made it and how. As technology improved in the 20th century, instrument makers such as Harmony Guitars (established by German immigrant Wilhelm Schultz in Chicago in 1892) created budget lines designed to be more accessible to the average person. And much of that gear could be purchased through mail-order catalogs from Chicago retailers Montgomery Ward and Sears, delivered to your doorstep, no matter your race, gender, or geographic region. The Sears catalog in particular has been credited with helping black southern Americans overturn Jim Crow laws by providing a place to shop outside of local white-owned businesses. As a result, the Chicago trade has had a direct influence on the development of blues, jazz, and many popular genres ever since.

From the late 1800s through the 1940s, the city was known as a piano city, not for the Prohibition-era weapon, the “Chicago piano” or “submachine gun”, but for the instrument of music that supplied a domestic and professional market. performance. Due to the demand for the instrument and its automated counterpart, the player piano, by the mid-1910s more than 40 piano manufacturers were operating in Chicago, including Bush & Gerts, Cable and Kimball, while a wide variety of other instruments were built. or distributed in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs: drums (Ludwig), violins (William Lewis & Sons), lap steel guitars (National), electric organs (Hammond, Lowrey), and more, more musical equipment like microphones (Shure) . A stretch of Wabash Avenue between Adams and Van Buren was known as “Music Row” due to the number of instrument makers, sheet music shops, and other music-related businesses in the area.

In the years following World War II, the piano was eclipsed in popular musical culture largely due to the rise of the guitar. Describing the city’s outsized role as the epicenter of guitar manufacturing and distribution for Premier Guitar in 2013, writer Chris McMahon opined that in the mid-20th century, “Chicago made guitars like Detroit made cars”. Between 1945 and 1978, Harmony sold ten million guitars, building 1,000 instruments a day in the mid-1960s when guitars were at the height of their popularity. And when Chicago wasn’t making guitars, it was distributing them: Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI) held majority stakes in Gibson and Epiphone.

While Music Row is long gone, Chicago remains a beacon of the musical instrument trade. As recently as 2007, a study by the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center ranked the city second in instrument manufacturing revenue and third in instrument retail sales among 50 metropolitan areas. the most populous in the United States. Today, many musical instrument and equipment makers who got their start at least a century ago still call Chicago home. Others, such as Hanson Guitars, Specimen Products, Emperor Cabinets, Lakland Bass Guitars and Maller Brass, have emerged over the past few decades. Online musical instrument and gear giant Reverb.com was founded in Chicago in 2013 and remains based on the city’s North Side. More and more companies are working to preserve the craftsmanship and innovation of older instrument makers, including JL Weiler, Sonksen Strings and Borish Electronics.

The next time you play a piece, know that no matter where it was created, chances are you can trace the material basis of the music lineage back to Chicago.

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