MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE — It’s a Friday night on Beale Street and Chicago’s Magic Slim & the Teardrops are on stage at the Rumboogie CafŽ, pumping up dancers with a raw shuffle and chanting the chorus "Hey, hey, the blues is all right" until the crowd starts singing along. The song they’re playing is one of the tiredest warhorses in the genre, but that doesn’t dampen the communal joy of the audience and band. So it’s smiles, sweat, and the stink of beer all around — exactly the kind of ambiance one expects in the best urban roadhouses where the blues are a staple.

But outside the doors of the Rumboogie, the blues aren’t all right. In fact, the style may be in worse shape than it was during the 1970s, when disco destroyed the market for live club performances and forced many musicians who played blues and other styles of music outside the mainstream to work in factories. The evidence of the blues’ hard times is everywhere. CD sales have declined throughout the music business, and the genre’s been hit especially hard as deep-catalogue retailers like Tower and HMV, who carried a large selection of blues titles, have reduced the number of their locations. Club owners feeling the economy’s pinch have cut back on booking midlevel artists and, in some cases, closed their doors. Somerville’s short-lived Blue Sky Grill is a recent local casualty. And many indie blues labels have trimmed back their release schedules or, like the once influential Rooster Records, outright disappeared.

These days, blues as authentic as bar-band heavyweight Magic Slim’s are rarely heard on Beale Street. When Beale was the entertainment district for Memphis’s African-American populace, from the 1920s through the ’50s, its blocks of taverns were a launching pad for hundreds of artists, from Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers to Furry Lewis, B.B. King to Rufus Thomas. Today Beale’s merchants advertise their strip as "the home of the blues," but with few exceptions the club-lined tourist trap’s stages are populated by pop cover bands, DJs, and karaoke singers. That’s the fault of the short-sighted Memphis business community, which is known for under-appreciating the musical legacy that compels many tourists to visit the old Southern city perched on scenic bluffs along the Mississippi River. Nonetheless, for at least one weekend a year in late May, thanks to the arrival of artists, business people, and fans for the W.C. Handy Blues Awards, Beale’s clubs usually teem with world-class proponents of the style.

But this year’s Handy Awards weekend, which ran from May 22 through 24, was instead a reflection of the blues’ hard times. The awards ceremony on the 22nd was a disappointment. Of the 25 major Handys presented, only six were claimed by the artists who won them. The only major star who attended was Solomon Burke, who stole the show with his closing set and won the Soul-Blues Male Artist and Soul-Blues Album categories for his 2002 comeback, Don’t Give Up On Me (Fat Possum). And the new talent showcased, with the exception of Memphis street musician Richard Johnston, was supremely uninspired, ranging from the lukewarm folk-blues of Australia’s Fiona Boyd and the dull-edged pop of Atlanta’s Delta Moon, to the heavy-handed blues-rock guitar hacksmanship and clichŽd lyrics of Yugoslavia’s Anna Popovic.

Following last year’s awards, an all-star tribute to Howlin’ Wolf with historic figures including guitarist Hubert Sumlin took place. Deep Mississippi bluesmen Sam Carr, the late Othar Turner, and Super Chikan held court in clubs, as did Louisiana Red, dark-and-stormy modernist Otis Taylor, the North Mississippi All Stars, and many others. The abundance of talent left musicians as skilled as R.L. Burnside protŽgŽ Kenny Brown and his band nowhere but the streets to perform. This year, the only relevant bluesmen on Beale were ex–Muddy Waters guitarist Bob Margolin, Chicago newcomer Nick Moss, Louisiana’s Chris Thomas King, and Kenny Brown, who this time performed inside the club B.B. King’s. On the streets, Johnston held court, tearing out energetic Mississippi-hill-country-inspired blues from his usual sidewalk outpost in front of the New Daisy Theater.

The lackluster awards show in the historic, gilded Orpheum Theatre at the end of Beale reflected not only the industry’s thin condition, but also the Blues Foundation’s struggles. The Foundation runs the awards, from the collection of nominations to the production of the ceremony. It also sponsors a number of programs aimed at providing education, health care, and the general promotion of the blues. This year, it took an injection of cash from guitar manufacturer Gibson and piano company Baldwin to make the awards happen. Since the Foundation gets most of its funding from the beleaguered labels and other elements of the industry, as well as from membership dues, it’s in jeopardy. The Foundation is on such shaky ground that earlier this year it considered an offer from a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, consortium to relocate there from its Memphis home, until a group of local businesses came to its aid.

Handy Awards night got off to a promising start with a pre-party at the Gibson guitar factory’s performance space, a spacious nightclub just off Beale, where Boston vocalist Toni Lynn Washington entertained and liquor ran free. But last year, a coterie of TV crews and journalists, including a reporter from E!, the entertainment network, crowded the red carpet to interview arriving stars like Ike Turner, Odetta, and Little Milton. This year, it was local TV and mostly journalists from blues publications, and the only pillars of the genre in attendance were ex–Waters Band members Pinetop Perkins (who won a lifetime achievement award and turns 90 on July 7) and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith.

The awards themselves, which were filmed for PBS by the Memphis affiliate, had the "let’s put on a show" looseness of a Little Rascals’ production. House lights came up and stayed on at inappropriate times. Microphones failed or were not at the ready for presenters. The co-hosts — Marcia Ball, Bobby Rush, and Delbert McClinton — were given insufficient instructions, which resulted in dead air. And the curtains rose and fell several times during Solomon Burke’s concluding 25-minute bonanza. Granted, Burke held the boards longer than his allotted period, but the three-hours before were devoid of excitement save for the appearance of Johnston, who was joined by the remaining members of Othar Turner’s Rising Star Fife and Drum Band (including R.L. Boyce, who, in another example of the New York Times’ crack reporting, was listed as dead in Turner’s March 1 obituary by Jon Pareles); a trio made up of Corey Harris, Sam Carr, and Bobby Rush; and sacred-steel-virtuoso-turned-jam-pop-hero Robert Randolph.

More disappointing was the lack of stars. B.B. King, who took Entertainer of the Year; Koko Taylor, grabbing her 23rd Handy for Traditional Female Artist; Shemekia Copeland, who netted the Blues Album, Contemporary Album, and Contemporary Female Artist categories; Etta James, who won Soul-Blues Female Artist; Charlie Musselwhite, who received the Contemporary Male Artist and Best Instrumentalist of the Year–Harmonica awards; and other major winners did not attend. So the anticipation of seeing which star would receive each prize was quickly supplanted by wondering which relative or label head would scoop it up for him or her. It’s worth nothing that Rhode Island’s Duke Robillard won the Instrumentalist of the Year–Guitar category, but also apparently had obligations elsewhere.

One wonders, at what point does an awards ceremony that’s not taken seriously by the artists it rewards and doesn’t meet professional production standards become irrelevant? Certainly that has nothing to do with the music, which at its best has maintained its character as a salve for the soul for a century, going back to its beginnings as an antidote to the trials of plantation life and Jim Crow. Like all styles of music, the blues have ridden swells and dips in popularity along the way. But in 2003, which Congress has proclaimed "The Year of the Blues," it’s ironic that for the blues, mere survival must be considered triumph.