Maybe it’s the move up to the fifth that is the central figure of the blues and rock. It tags on to the end of the verse like the turn of the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet, changing what came before. Listen to “Stormy Monday”: to church on Sun day; down on his knees to pray; ask the Lord for mercy, and then up on the fifth we discover the why of the thing: “Been trying to find my baby, won’t someone please bring her on home to me.” Suddenly, the song makes sense. It’s the essence of the 12-bar pattern on which all the good three-chord songs are structured.

Most books about rock ‘n’ roll tend to follow a similar pattern: Tie things up neat and quick. Stories are always told without context, as if the music had sprung into being fully formed. As if Dylan hadn’t actually brought the amplifier and Stratocaster to the festival, as if he hadn’t had to rehearse the new versions of the songs. As if the air hadn’t been pregnant with electric blues, rock ‘n’ roll, punk rock. But the music didn’t happen like that; the real story can’t fit on a 45″.

Consider this: Childhood friends Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ran into one another at the railway station in Dartford in October of 1961. Jagger had four or five records under his arm. Chuck Berry, Little Walter, Muddy Waters – they were Chess records. (When the Rolling Stones began to record, their first single was a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On,’ also a Chess record.) The constant battle over the origins of rock ‘n’ roll is a silly one, but Chess, where the blues went electric and morphed into something new, is certainly on the short list of significant places.

“Machers and Rockers” is a cogent, affecting tale of how Chess records got on that list, and at what cost. Leonard Chess and the musicians in his studio electrified the Delta sound, birthed rock music, and ultimately killed the blues. It’s a story with ramifications that run right up to the present day, and it starts with a couple of Polish immigrants on the South Side of Chicago.

In Motel Poland after World War I, the Czyz family decided to get out while the getting was good. Dad went to Chicago, and in 1928 sent for the wife and kids. Leonard Chess was 12. In 1945, after a series of low paying jobs and a stint in the family junk business, Leonard got a job at a liquor store in a black neighborhood. He set up some chairs around a jukebox in the back.

Blacks were also migrating to Chicago at that time: “To blacks in the South the train stood for freedom. It floats through dozens of tunes, appearing in old folk Blues and in city Blues and later in Rock & Roll songs written by jetage superstars who cannot possibly understand its significance.” (This is a big part of the fun of Mr. Cohen’s book: He is totally willing to digress whenever he thinks it’s relevant to the matter at hand.) The train took them to Chicago, to Bronzeville.

Muddy Waters, who came from Clarksville, Mississippi, worked in a container factory, a paper plant, and on a delivery truck. Koko Taylor, who came from Memphis, Tennessee, worked as a maid on the North side. Jimmy Rodgers, who came from Ruleville, Mississippi, worked at a chicken-processing plant, a shoe factory and a meat packing plant … These were the glory days of the South Side saloons, dozens of dance halls filling with sharpies who only wanted to party. The names of these joints read like a poem of lost Chicago: the Square Deal Club … the Circle Inn … Club Claremont … Club Georgia …Temp Tap.

Leonard Chess added his own club to the list, The Macomba Lounge. Record companies were constantly coming by to pick up the performers. “In 1947, when Sammy Goldberg, a black scout, came after Andrew Tibbs, who now and then sang at the Macomba, Leonard had a realization: Why recruit Andrew Tibbs so Sammy Goldberg can turn a dollar? Why not record Tibbs myself?”

He had some success. But “he was still looking for the new thing, the fresh sound that would carry him to the big time. And it was looking for him, too.”

Thus began a steady progression towards the moment that would inspire Leroi Jones to write: “Suddenly it was as if a great deal of the Euro-American humanist facade in African American music had been washed away.” Or as Mr. Cohen put it: “People loved to f- to this music, drink to it, get high to it, and listen to it as the sun went down over the prairie.” That music was MuddyWaters and his band. “When these records hit, they hit like M80s.”

Chess recorded the biggest and best of the blues: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Etta James, and then Chuck Berry. “You can draw a straight line,” Mr. Cohen writes, “from Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ to the Beach Boy’s ‘Surfin’ USA’ – it is in fact the same song – to the Beatles ‘Let It Be’ to Woodstock, and then on to the Real World on MTV,” Mr. Cohen writes. “The emergence of Chuck Berry marked the beginning of the end of old America.”

Clearly this is one of those sentences, those “And Things Would Never Be The Same Again” moments. But Mr. Cohen makes a good argument. If not this moment, which? Certainly this record, which was pressed in an initial run of 30,000 (rather than the 5,000 typical at Chess), was seen this way by Chess himself. “Leonard knew this was his chance: this new music, not yet called Rock & Roll, was his way into the mainstream.”

Chess made a bundle of money. But the attention the label attracted to rock ‘n’ roll ultimately doomed it. The songs were becoming popular enough to interest the majors. The sun shined for a little while, Chess made hay, and then he sold – for much less than he should have – and vanished. The blues musicians who made it possible? “It killed them, of course. It wiped them out. It sent them into early retirement.”

Mr. Watman last wrote for these pages on Hunter S. Thompson.