Creativity Quote by Luther Allison

Chicago isn’t just a dot on the map here; it’s a proving ground. “When I got to Chicago I had to find my way” lands with the plainspoken force of a blues line because it refuses romantic mythology. No triumphal “made it,” no tidy origin story. Just arrival, then the grind: orientation as survival.

For Luther Allison, a Southern-born guitarist stepping into Chicago’s electrified blues ecosystem, the sentence carries the hush of initiation. Chicago is historically the destination for Black migrants chasing steadier work and fuller possibility, only to meet new forms of pressure: crowded neighborhoods, hard landlords, harder bosses, and a music scene where talent wasn’t enough. You had to learn the codes of the bandstand, the politics of clubs, who could vouch for you, how to get heard without getting used. “Find my way” doubles as artistic and literal. It’s about navigating streets, but also about locating a sound that could stand beside giants.

The intent is modest but pointed: credit the city without flattering it. The subtext says, I wasn’t handed a lane. I earned one. That’s why it works culturally: it frames self-making as improvisation, like a solo built in real time, responding to what the room throws at you. In a genre that’s often packaged as raw feeling, Allison slips in something tougher and more contemporary: agency under constraint. Chicago didn’t give him a story; it demanded he write one.