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The untold story of Chicago’s pivotal role as a country and folk music capital.

Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes.

In Country and Midwestern, veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago’s influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest’s biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance —broadcast from the city’s South Loop starting in 1924—flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry.  Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like “Hillbilly Heaven” in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions.

Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City—celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.

About the Author

Mark Guarino writes about culture, national news, and all points between. He is a contributing writer to The Washington Post where he frequently covers Chicago and the Midwest. His writing also appears in The New York Times, The Guardian, Crain’s Chicago Business, The Chicago Tribune, Reuters, The Chicago Sun-Times, New York Magazine, Agence-France Presse, Mojo, Al-Jazeera America, among many other outlets. He was the Midwest Bureau Chief for The Christian Science Monitor for six years where he covered the BP oil spill, labor, the environment, Hurricane Katrina recovery, hate crimes, federal trials, among many other topics. He was also the pop music critic for The Chicago Daily Herald for 11 years.

He is a frequent media guest to talk about his work, having appeared on the BBC, CBC, Sirius/XM POTUS Channel 124, National Public Radio (NPR), Al-Jazeera television, “Chicago Tonight” (WTTW Chicago), WGN-AM, WLS-AM, WVON, Russia Today (RT), Geraldo Rivera (FOX), and other outlets.

Mark has taught journalism at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This event will be moderated by Don McLeese.  Before joining the journalism faculty of the University of Iowa, Don was an award-winning music journalist. He was a popular music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Austin American-Statesman, senior editor at No Depression, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone magazine.  He has written four books, including Dwight Yoakam, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere.