Arelean Brown

If you wandered into a smoky South Side club in Chicago during the early '70s, there’s a good chance you'd have been met by the raw, unvarnished truth of Arelean Brown’s voice cutting through the haze — fierce, funky, and steeped in blues grit. Born in Tchula, Mississippi in 1924, Brown carried the delta dust on her heels all the way to the Windy City, where she laid claim to a sound that was unmistakably her own. Her roots were rural, but her soul was urban — a blues singer in the grand Chicago tradition, but one who carved a bold new lane with every word she growled and every note she bent.