Chicago Folk: Images Of The 60s Music Scene
by Raeburn Flerlage With Ronald D Cohen & Bob Riesman (Eds)

An unrivalled collection of folk musicians in the Windy City

From the outside, Chicago seems an unlikely spot for a thriving folk music scene. The city famous for meat-packing seems the wrong kind of soil to foster the delicate tendrils of folk. Among the points made by the 60s folk revivalists, however, was that it wasn’t a fey musical form, but had very earthy roots.

This book documents the astonishing number of folk performers who blew through the Windy City, home to the legendary Gate Of Horn club, the Old Town School Of Folk Music (among whose alumni is Jim “Roger” McGuinn) and the University Of Chicago’s Folk Festivals. Raeburn Flerlage took thousands of photographs, from which the editors have selected over 200, most of them never before published. They have shrewdly mixed all the usual suspects with some very unusual ones: Mike Seeger and Bill Monroe rub shoulders with Roscoe Holcombe, Dock Boggs, Furry Lewis and Mance Lipscombe – the old weird America caught on stage! There’s a young Joan Baez and an even younger Bob Dylan. There’s also a fresh-faced Mike Bloomfield playing string bass for Big Joe Williams. ECW have made a beautiful job of this book and everyone involved with it has as many reasons to be as proud as readers have to be grateful.

5 stars 5 stars 5 stars 5 stars 5 stars

ISBN 9781550228731, 190 pages

Reviewed by Tim Holmes
<< Back to Issue 372

Login Here

Free Newsletter


Subscribe to
our email newsletter by emailing:

david.harvey@
metropolis.co.uk