Muddy Waters, left, at his Chicago home with the guitarist Mike Bloomfield in the early 1960s. More Photos »  LATE in his career, Muddy Waters recorded a song called âThe Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll.â That, in a nutshell, is the story told in the new documentary âBorn in Chicagoâ â how he, Howlinâ Wolf and other black blues musicians working in Chicago in the 1960s schooled young white acolytes from that city who went on to play on some of the most influential pop recordings of the era.  As the film, which will have its New York premiere at 9 p.m. on Friday at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center, makes clear, those lessons were transmitted not in a conservatory classroom but in bars, clubs, kitchens and even alleys. In a city divided along racial and ethnic lines, at a time when the civil rights revolution was just beginning, that made both the teachers and their pupils an exception to the unwritten rules.  âWe crossed those lines out of a love for the music, and met nothing but kindness, patience and generosity,â said the keyboard player Barry Goldberg, who helped produce the film and will also be part of a panel discussion after the screening. âWe wanted to learn from these great masters, and they were willing to teach us.â  The guitarist Elvin Bishop tells of being invited to the apartments of the players he admired, like Otis Rush, Sammy Lawhorn, Pee Wee Madison and Little Smokey Smothers, to learn new licks. There would be ham hocks and black-eyed peas cooking on the stove, he laughingly recalls in the film, but he would be told he couldnât have any until he got the riff right.  âBorn in Chicago,â which takes its title from a song that Nick Gravenites wrote for his pal Paul Butterfield, who along with him provided one of the inspirations for the Blues Brothers characters, was originally conceived of as a concert DVD featuring the Chicago Blues Reunion band. In addition to Mr. Gravenites, a member of the Blues Hall of Fame who worked with Janis Joplin and the Quicksilver Messenger Service, that group includes Mr. Goldberg, the harmonica and keyboard player Corky Siegel and the guitarist Harvey Mandel, who played with Canned Heat, John Mayall and the Rolling Stones.  âThe project just grew and grew, and suddenly we realized we had not just a narrow story, but one that was much broader and deeper,â said the filmâs director, John Anderson. âWe were so lucky to capture these anecdotes while these guys are still alive and here to tell the story. Everyone I talked to couldnât believe the story hadnât been told before, and they wanted to make sure the story got out there right.â  That may be especially true for the record producer and executive Marshall Chess, who narrates the film with a Chicago accent as thick as any in an old âSaturday Night Liveâ sketch. His familyâs record company and studio was home base for Muddy Waters, Howlinâ Wolf and Chuck Berry, and he was unhappy about how the Chicago blues scene had been portrayed in films like âCadillac Recordsâ and âWho Do You Love?â  âItâs important to know the real story,â Mr. Chess said. âI didnât like the Hollywood fictional treatment. In fact, I was embarrassed by it. This was an amazing part of American history and a big part of Chicagoâs creative history, though we didnât know it at the time because we were too busy trying to make hit records. I like to say that we had Beethoven, Mozart and Bach on the same label.â  The figure whose energy and charisma dominate much of the film, both through his playing and archival footage of interviews, is Mr. Chessâs high school buddy Mike Bloomfield, a guitarist who died at 37 in 1981 after years of drug problems. âMike Bloomfield was like a son,â B. B. King says in the film, but Mr. Bloomfieldâs contemporaries paint a picture of someone who was not only enormously talented, but also brash enough to make sure everyone else knew it too.  âHe said heâd heard my first record and wanted to show me how the blues was played,â Bob Dylan says in the film, recalling their first meeting in a Chicago club and chuckling at such audacity. Mr. Dylan adds that when he went electric and needed a lead guitarist to play on the groundbreaking âHighway 61 Revisitedâ album and at the Newport Folk Festival, âI couldnât think of anybody but him. I mean, he was just the best guitar player I ever heard, on any level.â  Much of the film is pervaded by a similar âsense of loss for a time and a place,â as Mr. Siegel put it. With the exception of the guitarist Buddy Guy and the drummer Sam Lay, who appears in a poignant scene at Muddy Watersâs house, where Mr. Lay and other members of the Waters group rehearsed, the musicians who originated the electrified Chicago blues style are gone. An interview in the film with the guitarist Hubert Sumlin, a breathing tube in his nose, is the last he gave before he died in 2011.
A new documentary, âBorn in Chicago,â looks at an era when blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlinâ Wolf took young white neophytes under their wing.