'Country & Midwestern' by Mark Guarino
Nashville gets all the attention, but Chicago was sometimes as vital to the development of what’s still called—for lack of a better word—country music. As Mark Guarino shows in Country & Midwestern, the WLS “Barn Dance” program was, at least before 1939, a more widely heard channel for county music than the “Grand Ole Opry.” And just as Chicago’s Chess Records took a leading role in propagating urban blues, the Windy City’s Kapp Records was a prominent exponent of “hillbilly music” (as country was once called). Because of its many industrial job opportunities, Chicago was a magnet for poor Southern whites as well as poor Southern Blacks.
The distinction between “folk” and “country” remained unclear until after World War II, but the increasingly separate genres were both rooted largely in the rural South and broadcast to the wider world through Southern migrations to Northern cities. During the 1950s and ‘60s Chicago was second only to New York in providing platforms for folk musicians, including nightclubs, festivals and the Old Town School of Folk Music. Guarino, a Chicago correspondent for the New York Times and Washington Post, follows developments through John Prine and the “insurgent country” of Chicago’s Bloodshot Records, demonstrating the Windy City’s ongoing vitality as a music mecca.
