Skip to main content
Advertise Buy the paper Contact us Shop Subscribe Support us
Passing the hat
TONY BURKE enjoys a rare history of those who play music on the street

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.”

Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Best of 2024 / 3 January 2025
3 January 2025
A landmark work of gay ethnography, an avant-garde fusion of folk and modernity, and a chance comment in a great interview
Theatre review / 29 November 2024
29 November 2024
ANGUS REID applauds the inventive stagecraft with which the Lyceum serve up Stevenson’s classic, but misses the deeper themes
Gig Review / 6 October 2024
6 October 2024
ANGUS REID time-travels back to times when Gay Liberation was radical and allied seamlessly to an anti-racist, anti-establishment movement
Interview / 15 March 2024
15 March 2024
ANGUS REID speaks to historian Siphokazi Magadla about the women who fought apartheid and their impact on South African society
Similar stories
Global Routes / 2 December 2024
2 December 2024
Two new releases from Burkina Faso and Niger, one from French-based Afro Latin The Bongo Hop, and rare Mexican bootlegs
Exhibition Review / 11 July 2024
11 July 2024
Co-curator TOM WHITE introduces a father-and-son exhibition of photography documenting the experience and political engagement of Chilean exiles
Exhibition review / 21 June 2024
21 June 2024
LYNNE WALSH applauds a show of paintings that demonstrates the forward strides made by women over four centuries 
Exhibition Review / 21 March 2024
21 March 2024
MARY CONWAY overcomes her resistance to the work of the 91-year-old Japanese American conceptual artist