Country and Midwestern

"The untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is rightly revered as a legendary musical breeding ground for blues, gospel, soul, hip-hop, and rock. Far less known, however, is the vital role the city played in the rise of 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. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, rural transplants and major record labels alike made Chicago their home, and the National Barn Dance -- broadcast from the city's South Loop -- 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 relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine. The story continues through into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions. Guarino celebrates 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. Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated 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." -- Jacket flap.