I got the opportunity to go out to the Hideout last night to see Chicago musician Rachel Ries Rachel’s has a wonderful voice and writes some great songs. She sings in a wonderfully haunting blusey voice that seems to waver delicately around melodies. Kind of like a Jolie Holland or Laura Gibson (or Madeleine Peyroux if you’re in the Starbucks Set). She has an excellent album called Without a Bird. Everytime I go to the Hideout I wonder why I don’t go there more. Laura was introduced with a story about these nice Chicago days in July when it’s not too hot and there’s a breeze and you get off work early and walk up the lake and the skyscrapers look pretty even the bad one and you ride the train up to the Hideout in the early evening and get a cheap tallboy and stand in a room lit up by christmas lights in the and get to listen to Rachel Ries and you realize this is why you live in chicago. Maybe it is, Maybe it is…go see live music and check out Rachel Ries.
Tags: rachel ries, the hideout
The other half of the Chicago’s Old Town School from Frank Hamilton was a guy named Win Stracke. Frank and Win met while performing at The Gate of Horn club in Chicago. The two were unlikely partners, while Frank was a young kid, at the founding of the school in 1957 Win was already an institution In Chicago (and somewhat nationally).
In addition to the albums he cut he was a founding member of I Come For to Sing a sort of folk variety show with Studs Terkel, Big Bill Broonzy and Larry Lane. He was a pioneering member of the Chicago style of television as a cast member on Stud’s Terkel’s show Studs Place and as Uncle Win on NBC’s Animal Playtime and Time For Uncle Win. He too, like Pete Seeger, was hit pretty hard by the Hollywood Blacklist, after loosing his television shows he relied on commerical voice over work during this period.
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Tags: Win Stracke
Congratulations to friend Mark Dvorak. Mark is a songwriter and folksinger in Chicago, he travels all over playing and has been a teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago for over twenty years. He has been a studious disciple of the folk tradition, teaching us the ins and outs of the songs of Big Bill Broonzy and Lead Belly. He will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement award this Sunday July 19 at the Woodstock Illinois Folk Festival. The festival runs from 12:30 - 6 pm in historic Woodstock Square. Come out and join us watch Mark get his award. Take a moment to listen to Marks’s set from June recorded at the Grafton Pub.
Tags: Mark Dvorak, woodstock folk festival
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I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.
- Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967)Â
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Happy Birthday (yesterday) to Woody Guthrie (96 years ago). Here are some links and quotes and whatnots. Also, if you’re in chicago come out to the Grafton Pub (Lincoln Ave) Jam session tonight at 9:30 and play along.
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Tags: Woody Guthrie
One Mike Stand July 2008 [65:37m]:
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This month’s One Mike Stand is Mike-less. No, not the rig, its alright, but host Mike Alberts is on vacation. While he’s off traveling Mark Dvork has taken over hosting duties for this show. It’s another good one singer-songwriter Randy Burgess shows off his finger picking chops and one-ups us all in technical prowess with his fancy pickup enabled guitar. In the second half of the show old time string band Kettle Moraine play some great folk, bluegrass, and honky-tonk songs, all this out of one microphone, what a deal! Kettle Moraine is Jim Sanabria, Kris Huysken, Dennis Harpole, and Ted Johnson. Ted is an original Old Town School of Folk Music student, he was present at the opening in 1957 and was one of the first hired teachers at the school.
Tags: Kettle Moraine, Mark Dvorak, Randy Burgess
Because apparently the “Canadian Press” knows a lot about the Chicago Blues scene:
Chicago blues scene wanes as the venerable genre grows tired
Blues guitar virtuosos and honey-voiced singers filled the Chicago streets with music during the 1950s. Muddy Waters’ guitar seeped from corner juke joints. Willie Dixon strummed bass guitar beats, echoing the city’s blues sound.
Now more than a half century later, a music that was born in the rural South and raised in the urban North, has grown old and tired. Its fan base is aging, key blues haunts have shuttered and some of its up-and-coming musicians are struggling. Nowhere is the decline more evident than in Chicago, arguably the city that made the genre famous.
The article concludes that the blues is dead in Chicago. Well good riddance to the Tourist Blues of Magic Slim and tired renditions of Sweet Home Chicago, but the blues is alive and well in chicago. The yearly blues fest in grant park should tide you over for your dose of Muddy Waters and Mustang Sally’s. True I’m not spending a lot of time at the Kingston Mines with the weekenders, and it’s true that the number of folk and blues clubs is way down in the last decade, but there are a growing number of options to see professional and amature music all over town. (Check out our own live page for some listings)
Where do you go to see blues (or any live music) in Chicago?
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Tags: blues, live music
“Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it.
My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle
they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they
created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me - and if I take
the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach
out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down
into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.” - Utah PhillipsÂ
The Pickin’ Bubs are Maura Lally, Peggy Browning, and Mark Mitchell. They are excellent musicians performing around Chicago and teaching at Chicagos’ Old Town School of Folk Music. They create lovely new songs and adapt traditional folk and blues songs with an everchanging series of guests and collaborators. The Bubs don’t just talk a lot about tradition; They are keenly aware of being part of a living music tradition. Like the quote says, they are aware of what’s in that stream, how to add to it and see the ability in us all to tap into that stream as we need. I put up a live set from them before the weekend (It also went out on our podcast feed, but check it out if you haven’t gotten a chance) , but here is the companion interview the Bubs were nice enough to give me.
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Tags: Big Bill Broonzy, Chris Waltz, Ed Holstein, Fred Holstein, John Hartford, Mark “Louie†Mitchell, Mark Dvorak, Maura Lally, Peggy Browning, Pete Seeger, The Pickin’ Bubs
the pickin bubs at the Grafton Pub June 2008 [1:11:00m]:
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We’ll have an interview with the Bubs on the next episode of the podcast but to tide you over until then this week we have a recording made at the Grafton pub in Chicago (Lincoln Ave) in June, as part of their monthly residency series. The Pickin’ Bubs are Maura Lally and Peggy Browning and anyone who happens to be around them they can grab when they get the whim. The Bubs are great at playing with a wide array of instruments and accompanists. They have a knack for interpreting traditional tunes and are even better at writing new ones that sound like they came from long lost 78s from Applachian cellers discovered and brought to new life. But I’ll leave them to next week to explain themselves, for now, it’s them and Guest Lauren Shera (an excellent California singer-songwriter who we talked about earlier, she played at Chicago’s Hideout this week). Lauren’s songs start at the 24:00 mark.
Appearing on this recording: Peggy Browning, Maura Lally, Mark “Louie” Mitchell, Mark Dvorak, Lauren Shera
Tags: Lauren Shera, Mark "Louie" Mitchell, Mark Dvorak, Maura Lally, Peggy Browning, The Pickin' Bubs
After posting the out of print album version of this concert a bit ago a friend of gave me a copy of the complete concert as it was broadcast on Chicago WFMT radio in 1956. Here’s a copy of it for all your Independence Day Barbecues. From the liner notes:
This historic concert was broadcast live on WFMT radio’s ‘Midnight Special’, on October 25, 1956. It was one of Big Bill’s last shows before being diagnosed with cancer, and one of Pete’s first visits to chicago after leaving the Weavers. This concert is remembered as an important event in Chicago folk music. Soon The Gate of Horn, the first folk music night club in the nation, would open on the near north side, and within the year the Old Town School of Folk Music would open it’s doors.
Click here to download an archive of this concert:
PeteAndBillNorthwestern.zip
See Also:
Pete Seeger and Big Bill Broonzy in Concert
Tags: Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger
