Strung Out Episode 190: JIM POST AND THE LOST ERA OF CHICAGO FOLK

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Oh, Chicago.   Once upon a time you had the WLS Barn Dance.  Once upon a time you two professional football teams. One upon a time you had the stockyards. Once upon a time you had the world's tallest building.  Once upon a time you had a music scene that was the envy of the world.    People would migrate to Chicago to play here.  Sure, there were other scenes like Greenwich Village and Haight-Asbury, but for a while (and I don't mean that tiny era with Green and Smashing Pumpkins) that Chicago was the epicenter of great singer-songwriters.  Goodman, Prine, Holstein, Smith, Koloc, Dundee, the list goes on. Add to that Jim Post. 
Jim Post is the iconic singer-songwriter of that era now long gone and almost forgotten.  A "self-made man", Post reinvented his style of music, themes of music and in a truly Chicagoan fashion, gave the middle finger to the music industry and set out on his own to make his own. 
Poet, theater director and producer and part-time historian recently held " A Night With(Out) Jim Post" at the SPACE in Evanston, Illinois.   There were the singers still around from that era (and still going strong, such as Anne Hills, Howard Levy and Corky Siegal to name a few) but the tone of the evening was a nostalgic look back to Chicago's Folk Heyday, when clubs like the Earl of Oldtown would bring around luminaries to catch the latest, hottest folk act going on at the time.    Do we mourn what we once had? Or do we suck it up and determine that to be a Chicagoan is to truly go it alone?  Richard and Martin discuss that.  Musical clips from the evening at SPACE are also here to enjoy.  You can enjoy the entire evening here.   And yes, Martin pressures Richard to create a Chicago-centric award, the Posties. 

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