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Passing the hat
TONY BURKE enjoys a rare history of those who play music on the street
buskers
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Down On The Corner – Adventures In Busking & Street Music
Cary Baker, Jawbone Press, £16.95
BORN and raised in Chicago, Cary Baker’s interest in street performers was first sparked in 1971.
“My father told me he wanted to take me to Maxwell Street,” he writes, “the decrepit Chicago district at which his parents — Jewish European immigrants — bought, sold, and traded in the 1940s. By the 1960s and ’70s, the neighbourhood was predominantly African-American and a hotbed for blues artists like Big John Wrencher, Walter Horton, Hound Dog Taylor and many more.
“We’d barely parked our car across Roosevelt Road when I heard the strains of a slide guitar played by a street singer named Blind Arvella Gray. We stood there and listened for an hour. I introduced myself, got his phone number, and ended up writing an interview feature on him for the then-brand-new Chicago Reader. They published the piece. Aged 15 my career as a freelance writer had begun.”
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