MOST AMERICANS ASSOCIATE “FOLK MUSIC” with rural America, someplace vaguely Southern, where white musicians pick, bow, and sing with a twang. A few may recall African American musicians, rooted in the South, who fashioned bent-note melodies into gospel and blues. Media and scholars offered a similar perspective, with an occasional nod to songs of the American West. That Illinois and Chicago played a key role was never considered.Not that Illinois folk music was overlooked. Illinoisans Carl Sandburg, Charles Neely, and David McIntosh published collections featuring Illinois songs. Irish immigrant and one-time Chicago police chief Francis O'Neill collected thousands of Irish folksongs in the early twentieth century. Decades later, old-time fiddler Garry Harrison documented regional fiddle traditions in Illinois, and his valuable collection is housed at Eastern Illinois University. Other sites around the state hold field recordings and related documents as well.Blues and gospel have also been recorded and documented. African Americans resided in Illinois since its beginning, and as the Great Migration advanced, their music caught the attention of record companies, journalists, and scholars. Rev. Thomas Dorsey, the Staples Singers, Muddy Waters, Koko Taylor, Junior Wells, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin’ Wolf, and Buddy Guy became stars and established Chicago as the vital center of gospel and blues, a position it maintains today.Turning to country music, we can see more clearly how Chicago and Illinois played a pivotal role in folk music and how the conventional paradigm limits our understanding. With the rise of radio and recording in the 1920s, music reached wider audiences. Chicago's WLS began broadcasting in 1924 and launched the National Barn Dance, a live broadcast featuring prominent “country and western” artists. The program's audience skyrocketed as WLS's power increased to fifty thousand watts and NBC broadcast the show nationwide. Chicago emerged as the capital of country music, a position it retained for nearly thirty years. Patsy Montana, Gene Autry, Bill Monroe, Smiley Burnett (Summon, IL), the Girls of the Golden West (Mt. Carmel, IL), Lulu Belle and Scotty, bluegrass legend Jethro Burns, and guitar icon Les Paul did stints on Barn Dance. Even as the program declined, country music maintained a substantial audience in Illinois. Chicago's WJJD broadcast as an “all country” station in the ’60s, the only one outside Nashville, and Barn Dance-style programs flourished on stations such as WDZ in Tuscola and WHO in Clinton. “Hillbilly Heaven,” Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, declined as a rural migrant locale, but “country,” “alt country,” and “Americana” still prosper in Chicago and all of Illinois.The music of the great “folk revival” also advanced. Beginning in the 1930s, people from Makanda to Waukegan campaigned to“preserve” all kinds of folk music. As a national revival took hold in the 1950s, the movement garnered momentum. Folk clubs and festivals sprang up across Illinois. The most ambitious effort came in 1957 with the establishment of the Old Town School of Folk Music by Frank Hamilton, Dawn Greening, and Win Stracke, with help from Big Bill Broonzy and Studs Terkel. Still in operation, the nationally renowned school offers a range of classes and concerts, and utilizes an inclusive definition of folk music. As the revival continued into the ’60s and ’70s the spotlight of stardom shone on singer-songwriters too, notably John Prine and Steve Goodman.At the very least, the “folk music” outlined above should persuade some to acknowledge Lincoln Land's key role in the genre. What happens, however, if we consider a less restrictive definition of folk music, one less Anglo-centric, one that encompasses the music of all Illinoisans and Americans? Shouldn't “folk music” be inclusive instead of applying immigration quotas and segregation to the model? America has always been a dynamic, multi-ethnic, multi-racial mass and nowhere has that mass created a more vital musical home than in Illinois and Chicago. Indeed, an inclusive model demonstrates Illinois’ premier role as torchbearer for the nation's folk music with Chicago at its core.We should hardly be surprised. Once home to a large, Indigenous population, Illinois became an outpost for French imperial aspirations and emerged as a key agricultural producer during the early republic and a crossroad for people and trade goods. White migrants settled the state, as did African Americans, though some were brought as slaves. Abundant waterways, canals, coal mines, and expanding railroads quickly established The Prairie State as the nation's trade center. Peoria, Moline, Decatur, and East St. Louis emerged as urban centers and Chicago soared as a major industrial and manufacturing center, the heart of the nation's steel, railroad, livestock, and meatpacking sectors.As the demand for workers surged, internal migrants, Black and white, poured into the state, as did Irish and German immigrants. Gilded Age immigrants, including Jews fleeing pogroms, arrived from Poland, Norway, Italy, Greece, Sicily, the Balkans, Sweden, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of Europe. After World War I, Illinois witnessed the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, followed by Mexicans and Mexican Americans, along with people from China, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, South America, and Africa. This diverse assemblage transformed Illinois society and folk music, bringing and co-mingling ingredients that gave rise to bluegrass, country, ballads, minstrelsy, labor protest songs, gospel, light opera, sentimental airs, and country and urban blues. Polka, tamburitza, worker anthems, Irish reels and céilí, comedic dialect songs, corrido, klezmer, Indian drum circles, Greek kalamatiano, and Japanese taiko, emanated from social gatherings, taverns, theaters, radio and television. Record companies took notice by the 1920s, recording acts such as Silvano Ramos and Daniel Ramirez, Franciszek Dukli, Julius Siik, the Kotsaka Concertina Quartette, the Moser Brothers, Eleanor Kane Neary, and the Polish Mountaineers.Folklorist Jim Leary asserts the need for “a more inclusive, fluid notion of American folk music, one that exchanges ethnic hierarchy for egalitarianism, one that stresses process over pedigree” and “where consistently rootsy, constantly evolving, and wildly combinatory musical experiences constitute the American folk musical norm.” Clearly, “folk music” includes a range of music and nowhere was that music more vibrant and revered than in Illinois and Chicago.
Bucky Halker (Thu,) studied this question.