While she may take too many creative liberties with her works to be considered a historian, one cannot fault Chicago novelist Renée Rosen for not doing her homework.

To prepare for her most recent novel, “Windy City Blues,” which is set in the midst of the Chicago blues movement in the 1960s, Rosen and her husband and ”partner-in-crime,” John, hit the open road. The pair traveled down the infamous U.S. Route 61, known as the “Blues Highway,” to learn more about the roots of the genre that revolutionized the music world.

Their trip took them through dozens of different stops connected with the history of blues throughout the Deep South, including juke joints, blues museums and old radio stations. They also stopped at several places claiming to be the infamous crossroads where musician Robert Johnson is said to have made a deal with the devil in order to become a master guitar player and songwriter.

The most impactful moment of Rosen’s sojourn had nothing to do with beats or rhythm, though. Instead, it came when she and her husband stopped at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, where witnessing the history of the violent and bloody struggle African Americans went through to achieve equal treatment under the law left the writer speechless, she said.

“It hit me when I was in there that this [‘Windy City Blues’] wasn’t going to be a book just about music,” Rosen said. “You could not separate the music from what was happening in society at that time. It was really emotional for me. I questioned whether or not I could do the story justice.”

Rosen separated the fact from fiction in her newest book during her visit to Dowagiac Friday night, as the featured author for the 26th
annual Dogwood Fine Arts Festival, which concluded this weekend. The author shared the history of the blues and the civil rights movement, as well as fielded questions from the audience during her presentation at the Dale A. Lyons Building at Southwestern Michigan College.

Rosen — a native of Akron, Ohio, who has called The Windy City home for the last 30 years — burst onto the writing scene in 2007 with the semi-autobiographical “Every Crooked Pot.”

Since then, she has established herself with a series of historical novels set in Chicago: 2013’s “Dollface,” a story about a woman who falls in love with two men on opposing gangs during the prohibition-era; 2014’s “What the Lady Wants,” a story about the love affair between business tycoon Marshall Field and his neighbor, socialite Delia Spencer; and 2015’s “White Collar Girl,” a story set in the 1950s about a struggling Chicago Tribune reporter whose fortunes change after she lands a secret source inside Mayor Daley’s political machine.

Published in February, her latest work, “Windy City Blues,” focuses on a young Polish Jewish immigrant woman, Leeba Groski, who, after moving to Chicago with her family, begins working for Chess Records, the famed record label that launched the careers of several major names in the blues. Through her work, she meets and falls in love with Red Dupree, a black blues guitarist. The two become embroiled in the civil rights movement.

While characters such as Leeba and Red are fictional, much of “Windy City Blues” is grounded in historical fact, including Chess Records.

Leonard and Phil Chess, two brothers who immigrated to Chicago from Poland, founded the company in 1950. The two were instrumental in launching the Chicago blues movement, finding and signing black musicians who had moved from the south to the infamous Maxwell Street in Chicago, one of the few places in the city where African Americans — as well as Jewish Americans such as the Chess brothers — could live without facing discrimination from other city residents, Rosen said.

“They had no musical abilities of their own,” Rosen said. “These guys didn’t play an instrument, they couldn’t sing, they couldn’t read music and they knew nothing about record producing. But they were really savvy businessmen.”

Among the artists who joined the label included Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, blues musicians whose skills with the guitar inspired — and, at times, was outright lifted by — bands in the years that followed, including The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin.

“Muddy Waters said it best: ‘The blues had a baby, and they named it rock and roll,’” Rosen said.

The Chess brothers also became involved with the civil rights movement, which was raging in the Jim Crow south during the growth of the blues. The pair launched the first African American centered radio station, WVON (which stood for Voice of the Negro), in 1963, which not only played predominately R&B music but also frequently updated listeners about the turmoil occurring down south.

“It [the station] is still going strong today, as Voice of the Nation,” Rosen said.

The characters in “Windy City Blues” also get involved with several historical flashpoints in the civil rights movement, including the trip of the Freedom Riders in 1961, where a group of activists traveled by bus from Washington to the South challenge segregation laws. Many of the riders were attacked or arrested during the trip, and members of the Ku Klux Klan and others opposed to desegregation in Alabama firebombed one of the buses during a stop in Alabama.

“The authorities actually said, ‘We will give you 15 minutes to do what you want to these people, and then we’re going to step in,’” Rosen said. “You can do a lot of damage in 15 minutes.”

The story also covers the 1963 Birmingham campaign, where African Americans were attacked with fire hoses and arrested during nonviolent protests against the city’s segregation laws. According to a radio DJ involved in the protests with which Rosen spoke to while doing research for the novel, many of the young student protestors were actually bonded out of jail by the Chess brothers.

“People always think that the white record men exploited black artists, which they absolutely did in many cases,” Rosen said. “But they also did a lot to help them, and help the cause.”

More than anything else, Rosen said working on “Windy City Blues” gave her a deeper appreciation of the blues, a genre of music she was unfamiliar with before, as well as the rich history behind it.

“[The book] proved to me one thing: whether you are into classical music, jazz, rock or country, the thing about music is that it gives so much, and it asks nothing in return,” Rosen said. “All you have to do is open your ears, and it will open your heart and mind. We have all listened to a piece of music that has taken you back to another point in your life or just changes the atmosphere of a room. I can’t think of another art form that is just about giving.”