Cary Baker: Adventures in Busking and Street Music
Through a hundred interviews and decades of observation, Baker's busking chronicle, Down on the Corner, reveals how the distance between Grammy-winning stages and subway platforms may be shorter than we imagine.
Today, the Spotlight shines On Cary Baker, author of Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music.
The music you hear on street corners and subway platforms has its untold history, and at age 16, Cary Baker followed a slide guitar's haunting melody through Chicago's Maxwell Street Market to find himself face-to-face with bluesman Blind Arvella Gray. That chance encounter sparked a lifelong obsession.
Cary's book, Down on the Corner, traces the heritage of street music across 100 years, from blues legends in the 1920s to modern-day buskers armed with QR codes. He's spoken with everyone from Lucinda Williams to Billy Bragg about their days playing for tips, revealing how many music careers began with nothing but an open guitar case.
The streets have always been America's most democratic stage, where doo-wop harmonies, folk ballads, and raw blues first reached public ears. Cary's book captures this vital tradition in all its gritty, authentic glory.
Dig Deeper
• Purchase Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music from Jawbone Press, Bookshop, Powell's, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon
• A new book explores a hundred years of busking history
• Cary Baker Writes the Definitive History of Street Music
• Chicago Music History 101: Maxwell Street
• Blind Arvella Gray: The Blues Over a Tin Cup
• How The Violent Femmes Went From Street Musicians To Major Record Label Stars
• Recalling a Struggler Who Soared: Ted Hawkins
• Cortelia Clark: A Nashville Busker, A Broken Grammy, A Burned Guitar
• Bongo Joe was a colorful street musician
• Fantastic Negrito
• Pronounced Normal: Remembering Wild Man Fischer
• Playing For Change Foundation
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I would love it if you could tell our audience about how you initially came to become interested in this topic of street musicians and street music and the early artists that sort of sparked this for you.
Cary Baker: I grew up in the Chicago area in the suburbs, a pretty middle-class existence, really. I never saw a street singer in Wilmette, Winnetka, or Glencoe. My father one day, being the son of Eastern European immigrants, wanted to show me a street called Maxwell Street in Chicago. It's where his parents used to take him. It was a flea market, and his parents used to take him there to buy, to sell, to trade. I think there was a sense of community there, and he wanted to show it to me. He assured me I'd only want to see it once.
So we parked the car over by the University of Illinois, walked across Roosevelt Road, and the first thing I hear is a slide guitar—and not just slide guitar, but slide guitar against metal on metal. It was just a tone I'd never heard before. We followed the music and eventually found a blind, Black, older street singer with a Dixie cup safety-pinned to his lapel. He was singing a very long version of the folk blues traditional anthem "John Henry," and he was adding lyrics to it about Maxwell Street and nearby Halsted Street.
It was very intriguing, and he went on forever. He figured that people were probably just passing him by, so the song went on and on. When he finally took a break, I introduced myself. I was only 16 years old. I had a radio show on my high school FM radio station, a blues program, and I knew a little about blues. I was very intrigued, so I got his phone number.
I called him up in the next week or two and asked if he could do an interview. I happened to be walking by the Northwestern University campus and picked up a new publication that I hadn't seen before called the Chicago Reader. It was fairly new—I think it was the first or second edition. I thought this could be a good home for my story about this blind street singer. So at age 16, I typed up a story based on the interview, using my best instincts about writing, and sent it in with a stamped envelope to the Chicago Reader in downtown Chicago.
Lo and behold, the next time I walked by the Northwestern campus, there it was in print. It was my first article, really. I went to his house and I interviewed him further for Living Blues Magazine. By now I'm really into blues and reading the magazines. I found out that he has a sister who's also a street singer, and I interviewed her as well.
Before you know it, not only did I want to see Maxwell Street more than once, I was going there just about every Sunday I possibly could. There were many street singers. I mean, this was the end of the era, clearly, but I was just old enough and there soon enough to see Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis, who had made an album for Electra Records, Little Pat Rushing, and others.
I was very intrigued with street singers, and I ended up producing an album by Arvella Gray, the guy with the metal slide guitar. I'd pick him up at his apartment, took him to the South suburbs, and we recorded all night for a little label that was better known for old-time country music but made an exception when I told them about this guy.
So the album came out. I was responsible for bringing the artist to the label. Later on, I reissued the record on my own CD—I started a label just to reissue this recording to preserve it in the CD era. I really kind of made this guy my project.
I majored in journalism at Northern Illinois University. I graduated, and by now I'm kind of a brand-name freelance writer—not the biggest, but I was working. I got a call from a punk/new wave magazine in New York called Trouser Press asking me, "Is Milwaukee anywhere near Chicago?" And I'm like, "Yeah, sure. Why? What do you need?"
They told me about a band that had just been signed to Slash Records called Violent Femmes. They told me that the thing about this band is that they played punk rock on acoustic instruments—folk punk, if you will—and they were buskers, street singers. I thought, "Wow, okay. I'm into street singers. I'll go up there." It was only about a 90-minute drive from where I was. We did the interview in the street, and they demonstrated a little bit of their street music for me. I was very intrigued.
By that point, the third major pillar of my inspiration for writing the book came when I got a job offer in Los Angeles. This was in 1984. I did what everybody does when they move to LA or even visits LA—I took a walk down Venice Beach boardwalk. I was vastly intrigued. I'd seen beaches on Lake Michigan, but nothing like this. So I'm walking and taking in all the sights and sounds, and it's a lot to absorb.
Lo and behold, I hear a singer that sounds like Otis Redding—a really deep, resonant soul voice. I look, and it's this older Black man seated playing guitar, with white hair and a white beard. It turns out his name was Ted Hawkins. The thing about Ted Hawkins is that he was good—genuinely good. As I found out more about him, he had been institutionalized, imprisoned, had a very hard life, but had gotten his act together and played every Saturday and Sunday reliably on the Venice boardwalk, commuting from his house in Inglewood.
Lo and behold, he was actually signed to Geffen Records. Here he is, more or less a street singer, but anything can happen in LA. The guy who signed Beck and a number of other successful artists to Geffen Records, Tony Berg, signed Ted Hawkins. It was one album. It didn't sell a lot of records, but it got a lot of press. He got to tour the world. It was certainly the best thing that ever happened to him.
So those were really the three pillars: Maxwell Street; Milwaukee, of all places, where the Violent Femmes not only busked but were discovered busking by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders when they were doing a gig at a nearby theater (they asked them to come in and play a few songs ahead of the real opening act); and Venice Beach.
I kept my eyes open for street music. I attended many South by Southwest conferences. There was a singer out on East Sixth and Brazos—you could book the time and the place. Her name was Mary Lou Lord, and she was a very credible indie rock artist who couldn't get a real, official inside gig at South by Southwest. So year after year, she'd come and play outside. Sometimes she'd be joined by people like Billy Bragg, who himself was a busker, or Elliott Smith.
And a few trips to New Orleans, too, where I certainly passed through Jackson Square and took a walk down Royal Street. Saw my share of Dixieland buskers, blues buskers, folk buskers. There aren't many here where I live in the California desert, and I didn't see many others in LA, but really, those were the ones that got me thinking about doing this book.
Lawrence: When you go back and look at some of your earliest writing, the Chicago Reader piece, has your perspective on how you've thought about that tradition changed? Or did you have a fully formed sort of thesis at a young age? How has your point of view or thinking about the life of a street musician and busking changed?
Cary: I think I saw buskers as—what would be the word?—I saw them as maybe breaking local ordinances. I didn't really know what the legality was. I thought that maybe they were regarded as outlaws of a sort by municipal governments. But as I went through New Orleans and Austin and Venice boardwalk, it occurred to me that they're really enriching the experience of being outside.
And in the age of people not even going to stores anymore—anything you want, you can get on Amazon—I think that they add life and vibrance, they add color to a community. As I did the book, as I did a hundred interviews for the book, people seem to agree that from subway and tube stations to downtown areas, to beach boardwalks, it's a blessing to have street music.
Many cities have outrightly legalized it now, and now the problem is getting a space and respecting other people's space if they've held that space for a while. I've noticed that buskers tend to go to the same area. One couple who busks in New Orleans told me that they remember having to get up at 3 a.m. to hold their space, which was a good space. They couldn't even really start until rush hour, until people were on the streets, but they would get there at 3 a.m. and hold their space and do nothing for like four hours. This is before you could even look at your iPhone for four hours.
I talked to buskers who busked in subways and tubes, along Parisian cafes, obviously Maxwell Street, Chicago, Venice boardwalk. Wildman Fisher busked on Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard. People busked all over, but what I really came to see is that buskers are an asset to a community.
There was even a guy that I didn't get a chance to talk to because he's deceased, unfortunately, named Bongo Joe. His real name was George Coleman, but he played the oil drum. And when I say that, I don't mean Jamaican steel drums or Calypso—I mean an oil drum, just a raw oil drum. He would bang on it, and that's how he got the name Bongo Joe. Apparently, he would actually carry the oil drum on a moped to his spot on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. He had to fight various legalities—he was arrested at some point—but I think people came to see him as an asset.
Not only that, but a very credible folk label called Arhoolie Records in El Cerrito, East Bay, California, signed him to a one-album deal, and Bongo Joe got to make a record on the same label where you could also find Lightnin' Hopkins or Big Mama Thornton or various others of that sort. Occasionally people would recognize what they had in these street singers.
What I really wanted to bring across in the book is that street singing is an asset—it's a colorful, cool, vibrant asset to a city.
Lawrence: Do you think about a taxonomy of street musicians in terms of people that might be making original music versus people more just entertaining to earn a buck? And as a corollary to that, can you articulate the tradition that this mode of performance is within, or in other words, how far back is there an unbroken chain?
Cary: Let's answer your second question first. Busking goes back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Obviously, I don't go back that far, but there was a pre-existing book on busking, a very fine one called Buskers, published in 1981. At first I was upset—the book already exists—but it was published in 1981, and it took a slightly different approach. It was far more oriented to the history of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Shakespeare in the park, Benjamin Franklin (who knew was an orator, obviously a statesman, but a musician and singer at times).
So it goes way back, and I tried to briefly recapitulate that history before I went to the present day. By the present day, I mean my book starts about 1920 with Blind Lemon Jefferson in Dallas and Reverend Gary Davis in Durham, North Carolina, and some of the pre-World War II blues artists.
It also goes to an era that I was a little too young for, and it's even hard to find eyewitnesses. It wasn't that long ago, but doo-wop singing groups, R&B singing groups—there weren't many of those players alive that I could find, but I did find Jay Siegel of the Tokens. There were Black vocal groups, there were Italian ones (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Johnny Maestro come to mind), and here was a Jewish one, Jay Siegel from the Tokens, talking about how they used to play at Rockaway Beach.
I actually have a friend in common with Mike Stoller of Leiber & Stoller, the duo that wrote several hits for Elvis Presley. I found a way to talk to him, and he was telling me, "Well, first of all, we didn't write doo-wop, we wrote R&B. And second of all, I never saw a band, a group on the street corners, but I certainly did hear enough of them rehearsing in the men's room at the Brill Building," where a lot of the recording and A&R and songwriting got done for that era of pop music.
So I decided to include men's rooms in my definition of busking—any stage, really. I have beaches, I have tubes and subways, I have streets, I have curbs and riverwalks, and now I have men's rooms as well. (laughter)
Lawrence: Non-traditional public performing spaces.
Cary: That's right. That's right.
Lawrence: Is the definition of a busker or a street musician generally synonymous with subsistence living? Or were these people that do this as a hobby? How should a reader or someone listening to us think about the profile of this musician? Or is that too general of a way to think about it?
Cary: It is definitely a living. You know, I was very happy—I mentioned Blind Arvella Gray from Maxwell Street. When I finally saw his apartment, I was delighted that he lived in relative comfort, a street singer living on quarters and dimes as people threw into his Dixie cup. I was gratified to see that he didn't live in splendor—he was blind—but he lived in a very nice Chicago-style brownstone apartment.
A lot of these buskers are very savvy business people. They're buskers, but nowadays, especially, it's not just about the quarters or the dollar bills that are thrown into guitar cases. It's QR codes, it's PayPal and Venmo, it's social media. "Hey, I will be playing in Boston Commons between one and three today. Come on down. Here's my barcode." If people come down, sometimes they might even pay in advance. So it's become a livelihood.
There are quite a few people I wish I'd gotten into the book, but there's one that I've gotten to know on social media named Ilana Katz Katz (that's K-A-T-Z times two). She's the queen of social media. She's all over Instagram. She also designs clothing that she sells out there and sells her CDs. It's quite an industry. She will announce to her fans that she's going to be at Boylston Street—I don't know Boston that well—like a Friday at three o'clock, Friday rush hour, come on down, and people do. People seem to make a living this way.
You asked earlier about original versus cover material. It's funny, I was doing a book festival for this book, the 29 Palms Book Festival. About 500 people attended, bigger than I thought. One of the days of this festival also coincided with the 29 Palms Farmers Market. There was a busker—I guess you could call him that—out front, playing electric guitar, kind of smooth jazz style, and he had a backing track. You could hear the bass, you could hear the drums. He's sitting there, and I gave him a buck, but I asked myself, "Does this really count?"
Certain people are playing their hearts out. They can play cover songs, but this seemed to be playing by numbers. I just wasn't really impressed that this fit my definition of busking.
Can you walk by a busker without throwing a dollar in? No, I, these days I'm very conscious of good busker karma. I mean, I was in the Tommy Bahama store in Palm Desert the other day, and there was a guy playing to a backing track and kind of smooth jazz, but not only did I throw him a buck, I held up my phone with a picture of my book cover, in case he was interested in acquiring that.
I came across some buskers in Nashville. I was at the Americana Music Awards, and right outside the Ryman Auditorium, there was a couple busking. They were taking a break, so I introduced myself and threw a few bucks and told them about my book. Fine if they buy it, fine if they don't, but I was happy to support them and thank them for what they were doing.
Lawrence: I'm curious about something that I think you're uniquely able to comment on, one because of the journalism you've done around this topic, but also your career. It's the dialogue and the give and take between the street musicians and what I'll call, in air quotes, "the mainstream music business." I have a few questions to get into with that. One thing I'm curious about is what you know, or what you came to learn about how the street performance and the Chicago blues sound fit together. Was there a progression? What did that look like? And who might the key figures have been?
Cary: I can answer that. Maxwell Street goes a lot farther back than Blind Arvella Gray. In fact, he was one of the final artists to play before the neighborhood got gentrified. Don't get me started on that—I think that was an awful mistake. Maxwell Street could have been what Beale Street is to current-day Memphis, or what Bourbon or Royal Streets are to current-day New Orleans, or what East Sixth Street is to Austin.
But Maxwell goes way back, a lot farther than I go back. It was first populated by Eastern European, mainly Jewish immigrants in the forties, but by the late forties, it had become very Black. You could see Muddy Waters, young Muddy Waters playing there. Chuck Berry actually played there. Little Walter, often called the Coltrane of the blues harmonica, played Maxwell Street. This is long before my time, this is the late forties now.
There was a record store that had to get into the record, into the music business because there was a demand for 78s by Little Walter and Johnny Young. So I heard a funny story—there are all kinds of people I would have liked to have gotten into the book, and if I do a volume two, I know exactly who I want to interview. I have a running list of artists for that.
But one of them, Bobby Rush, I happened to see at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis this year. I went this past May, and I told him a lot about my book. He gave me a funny story about Maxwell Street. He had played a blues bar on Chicago's South Side all night, and bars in Chicago close on weekends at 5 in the morning. So he loaded up his equipment and didn't even stop at his apartment—he went straight to Maxwell Street. It's now about 6 a.m.
And who's walking down the street? B.B. King, who's not yet a superstar, but he, too, is in the early fifties. Probably the early fifties by now. He's walking down Maxwell Street, and Bobby Rush knows him and says, "Hey, B.B., you want to sit in with me?" And B.B. says, "I'd love to. It'll cost you 50 bucks though."
So they played for a couple of hours, and they made a total of 55 dollars in tips. Right off the bat, 50 of that went to B.B., and Bobby Rush and his band split the remaining five. That's his busking story, and there are a lot of great ones.
Lawrence: That's incredible. Cool. What about the connection between doo-wop and the streets? My understanding is that doo-wop was really shaped by the places it was performed, non-amplified music, the voices, the voices in a circle or in a line. Can you talk about that music? Would it probably not exist if not for its street roots? Is that fair to say?
Cary: Oh yeah, doo-wop, as I mentioned before, is very rooted in the streets, basically high school students on their way home, stopping at a populated street corner in the Bronx or Harlem or Philadelphia or the South Side of Chicago.
The Dells are a perfect example. They're from Chicago. I know a little more about them than I know about some of the New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore or even Los Angeles doo-wop groups. The Dells had several hits, and you can hear the doo-wop progression all the way up to being a slick soul group, really.
"Stay in My Corner" was a doo-wop song. "Oh, What a Night" by The Dells, another real doo-wop song. I mean, they added some instruments in the studio, but you can hear the doo-wop harmonies. You can hear the street corner well up as you listen to those songs.
On the radio, by the time I was in junior high or high school, they had a pop hit called "There Is." Maybe it only got played in Chicago, but it was a slicker soul song. That was my first impression of The Dells. Then I went back in time and heard their harmonies, and you could hear them in the streets of Harvey, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago, where they used to play after school.
Lawrence: What about the performers who seem to move back and forth between their sort of what I would call club careers and going back out to busk? You talked about a few of those artists in the book. What kept them coming back to that life?
Cary: One of my favorite stories in the book was an artist named Fantastic Negrito, who has won, oh, I'd say about three Grammys, perhaps a few Blues Music Awards, and an Americana Music Award. So he's got quite a career now. But his career didn't start as fantastic.
Fantastic Negrito—his real name is Xavier—is from Oakland, California, inner-city Oakland. Somehow or other, he got up an act that sounded a little like Prince, maybe a little bit of Prince and a little bit of hip-hop. He got signed to Interscope Records. And if you get signed to Interscope Records about the late, late eighties, you're going to be a star. I mean, just ask Dr. Dre, Snoop, Nine Inch Nails, Eminem—if you got signed to Interscope, that's the big time.
But it didn't work for Xavier, this artist from Oakland. So he got kicked, booted off the label and went back to Oakland, California, and became a pot farmer. But he missed the music, so he would go out to the streets of Oakland and play. He found that he had a whole different sound and a whole different persona. Instead of being Xavier, the artist a little like Prince, he was now Fantastic Negrito playing kind of a folk blues, going back to his roots.
He wasn't really thinking acoustically until he heard himself busking, and he was doing that really just for pleasure, for passion, for purpose. I don't think he was expecting to become a star from that. But that was what finally elevated him—not to the height of Dr. Dre or Snoop commercially, but certainly to the point where he could win Grammys in the blues category or Blues Music Awards or such, and he is touring.
I finally had a chance to meet him in Nashville when he was receiving his Americana award—not lifetime achievement, but an Americana award.
Lawrence: Something that I think you've really done as a service is you've opened the aperture of—this is not a New York and London phenomenon. You talked about a lot of U.S. cities when you were speaking earlier, but you've given exposure to the idea that this is a global phenomenon, not even just a Western phenomenon. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you've learned in your travels and what are some of the common elements that you might find in street music around the world? And are there any sort of peculiarities that are regional?
Cary: Let me qualify that. I really didn't write about busking throughout the world. I'm sure that you can go to Sydney, Beijing, Singapore, all kinds of places, but I kind of limited my scope to North America, including Canada, maybe not so much Mexico, and Europe, as it turns out, because a lot of the artists that I think were key buskers, or even American artists as expatriates—a couple of stories there.
I did talk to a few British people, one of whom was Billy Bragg. Billy told me that he now plays major festivals and theaters, of course, but if he doesn't get a sound check, that's no problem. He always was able to wing it on the streets; he can wing it on stage. It might just take a little bit of tuning and peg turning, twirling, and suddenly he's in tune. He learned the spontaneity of that by busking in London.
I had a few artists who were Americans who went to London and went to Paris to busk. Mojo Nixon, who sadly died soon after I interviewed him, was telling me that he wanted to join The Clash after college. I don't know if he's being flippant or funny or what, but maybe in his mind's eye, he wanted to join The Clash. At any rate, he went to Britain and started playing in the tube.
And Madeleine Peyroux, who is a jazz singer with several excellent albums of laid-back acoustic vocal jazz, was raised by kind of a bohemian, hippie single mom who took her to Paris during her childhood and took her to Cannes for the festival and basically told her, "Hey, sink or swim. Sing for these people, see what you can do." And she was singing in front of French, Parisian cafes—that's really how she cut her teeth.
Coincidentally in Paris, she met a lot of French musicians, but she also met an American musician—name escapes me, but somebody who played with Dylan, who was an actual Dylan contemporary who is now in Paris and somehow had a lot of money, enough to have his own boat and his own Mercedes-Benz. So whereas she was used to thumbing a ride or walking or taking Parisian tubes or subways, she was now riding to her gigs on a barge and in a Mercedes-Benz.
She also told me that during the pandemic, busking saved her and probably saved a lot of people. I know I was starved for concerts as a concert-goer, starved for seeing faces out there, but she lived in New York, and she would go out into the streets where it was safe enough, at a distance, to busk for people. She missed playing, and that kept her creative juices flowing. It probably did a lot for the people who felt isolated. All the concerts were canceled and all the live events—just to have that kind of eye-to-eye human contact with a busker was life-saving on both sides.
Lawrence: Given the nature of social media and all of us having a production studio in our pocket, I would think that it's changed a little bit the nature of busking, in that for probably the majority of the form's history, it's been by its very nature ephemeral and potentially undocumented. I'm wondering what change you know about in both the musicians and the passersby, but also—what's the role of documentary in your book? Was it important to you to, beyond just documenting busking as a mode of performance, preserve the people as well? I wonder if you could talk about that.
Cary: As far as the recording studio aspect, a few great busking albums were made on the streets, but not recently. I think people just haven't thought about it. It would be a great way to make a record, to capture an artist on the streets. A few great ones were made.
I wish I'd recorded Arvella Gray on Maxwell Street. You can actually find on YouTube a few videos of him doing so, and they're pretty fascinating. One of the artists that I dealt with, named Cortelia Clark, was a Chicago-born, blind, Black blues singer, not unlike Arvella Gray in a way, who migrated down to Nashville and played in front of the F.W. Woolworth downtown.
I love this because it parallels my experience. I never saw Cortelia Clark, but there was a Nashville white kid named Mike Weesner who used to go shopping with his mother to F.W. Woolworths. Lo and behold, there's this busker playing blues and gospel named Cortelia Clark. And just like I introduced myself to Arvella Gray, Mike Weesner introduced himself to Cortelia Clark.
Turns out that Mike Weesner grew up to be a semi-well-known record producer. And Cortelia Clark was still out there on the streets. So when Mike Weesner had entrée to, say, RCA Records' Nashville Music Row office, he went there and said, "Would you like to sign this street singer who plays out in front of F.W. Woolworths on Fifth Avenue North in Nashville?"
And of course they thought he was crazy. RCA Nashville was the label of Chet Atkins, Elvis Presley—why sign this street singer? But he actually communicated the documentary nature of this project, and they recorded him on the streets.
Lo and behold—and this is great—the album got nominated for a Grammy Award in the folk category because the folk category was un-policed, under the radar, and nobody really campaigned to get an artist a Grammy in the folk category. But if you worked for RCA Nashville or Columbia Nashville or Warner Brothers Nashville, you could gather your employees and in a memo say, "Hey, when you vote in the Grammys, be sure to vote for this in the folk category this time, for this artist named Cortelia Clark."
The folk nominations come out in 1967, and lo and behold, there's Cortelia Clark in the folk category. Also there is, I believe—check me on this—but I think Judy Collins and a few other real folk artists, real folk stars, two or three of them.
And then, oddly enough, another blind street singer, a white blind blues singer from New York named Oliver Smith, who had a similar discovery playing in Midtown Manhattan. An A&R scout for Elektra Records, which was very independent at the time and mainly a folk label, happened to be walking home from work, heard the street singer, and went back to Elektra and got Jack Holzman, the owner of Elektra, to come out and see this guy. Jack said, "Yeah, let's record him," so they recorded that afternoon. An album was made right on the spot. That singer was never heard from again. The album was released on Elektra Records, and it too was in the folk category that year. So it was a very potent category for buskers, the folk category that year.
I believe Oliver Smith's album was recorded on the streets as well. And Cortelia Clark, Bongo Joe (who I mentioned before, the oil drum player in San Antonio), was recorded on the streets. I think there's not enough of that going on, but there is one organization that I conclude with in the book called Playing for Change, run by a guy named Mark Johnson, who has really made a mission of saving—pretty much saving busking. They have gone all over the world.
Whereas I used to use Zoom, I use telephones, I use email, I did very little traveling—they have actually taken cameras physically to wherever the buskers are, and that includes Africa. Playing for Change supports buskers, supports the homeless. It's a very good cause. It's ongoing. It's an organization. It's a foundation. I believe the owner lives in Venice, California, where you can see a busker or two within about a five-minute walk of his house.
Playing for Change is a great organization. There was another label run by a guy who ran several labels in the eighties and nineties, who lives—he's retired now here in the California desert—who was going to start a busking TV series, but that got foiled, unfortunately, during the pandemic and just never picked up again. But there are some people, like Playing for Change, that care about street music.
I conclude the book by thanking Mark Johnson, the guy from Playing for Change, for taking an hour to talk to me on the phone. And I conclude the book with his quote after that, which is, "Hey, thank you. I could talk about street singers all day." So it was nice to meet a kindred spirit in that respect, somebody who's done so much for the medium of street singing.
Lawrence: What's really incredible about the work they do is, on the one hand, the pairing of the street musicians with the celebrity, and that construct is just so clever and beautiful. But the other piece is the level of production quality. Like when you watch one of their videos, you could see the mainstream music performer whose song they're doing, and then you can see these folks from all around the world, and it's the same beautiful video quality. The locations that they're in, just by the very nature of going to their spaces, are really kind of striking. I always find they're very beautiful.
Cary: They are. I mean, especially their—I think the most famous song is "Stand By Me," the old Ben E. King R&B song that shows singers from all over the world singing simultaneously to it. That was a hit video and a hit on YouTube, and I think it raised a lot of money for their cause as well.
Lawrence: It's really neat. I love the idea of a busker TV show. That seems like it's ready-made for YouTube. Somebody's waiting to be a YouTube celebrity doing that.
Cary: Oh, I had lunch with the guy doing it in the past year, and it doesn't seem like he has any aspirations of taking it up again, but somebody ought to. I think it'd be a great TV show and a great documentary. If anyone wants to work with me on a documentary, documentaries are hard—the music clearances are not easy to accomplish. There are a lot of factors involved. It takes a lot of budget, but I would love to consult on such an endeavor.
I think this would be a great documentary, and there's a lot of old footage. I mean, obviously, a lot of buskers, a lot of people in my book were deceased, but, thank God, a lot of eyewitnesses remain, at least for buskers in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Lawrence: You mentioned earlier about coming across some YouTube footage, and I wonder, were you able to find any documentary evidence of some of the personalities that you knew only by name?
Cary: First of all, there's a documentary about Ted Hawkins on Venice Boardwalk. Secondly, there's a documentary about Maxwell Street called "And This Is Maxwell Street..." which you can find on YouTube. So at least those two I know about, and there's a lot more.
I really can't think of any major documentaries of artists documented on the street. I think it's wide open, but if you look for it, if you YouTube search for people who have known the buskers on the streets, you will find various YouTubes of them, most of those very low fidelity, which I like about it, of course.
Lawrence: Yeah, I had it in my head that there might've been people with early super eight cameras or whatever, taking them out and about just shooting stuff. That would be fun to find.
Cary: I was watching the yacht rock documentary, like everybody else was in the last week. And it occurred to me how street music is really the antithesis of yacht rock in so many ways, down to the name "yacht rock." I think what I really like about it is the spontaneity of it, the fact that it is low fidelity, the fact that anybody can go out and do it, and you either sink or swim. If you're good, you get a following sometimes. And so much of it has to do with dumb luck.
The Violent Femmes might've still been out there in Milwaukee if Chrissie Hynde and James Honeyman-Scott of The Pretenders hadn't been doing a gig at a nearby theater. They've got a little bit of time after soundcheck, they check out this band, and ask them to be the opening act for the opening act.
Like I said, Ted Hawkins being discovered by a Geffen scout producer, actually an A&R executive—some of that is just dumb luck. I mean, there are a lot of buskers whose names you'll never know in every city, who lived and died. I knew a lot of them on Maxwell Street. I actually made a point to, if I didn't know their name, I would ask them or I would ask somebody, "Hey, who's that?" And I would be told, "Oh, that's Little Pat Rushing. That's Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis. That's Blind Jim Brewer."
There were a lot of others where Arvella Gray came from, but Arvella Gray is the one who meant most to me and really guided me, gave me inspiration throughout this process. He died in 1980. We'd fallen out of touch. I was in college by then, and I like to think that I helped him and helped busking a little bit by getting his phone number and writing an article for the Reader and then making that record. It's not like that record was a bestseller—I don't care. It's not like this book will be a bestseller—I don't care, but it's out there. And I did both of them for love of music that's a little bit homespun, a little bit lo-fi, a little bit spontaneous, imperfect.
I mean, I like perfect music too, and like I said, the yacht rock documentary, I was really grooving to Steely Dan and Michael McDonald. I like all kinds of music, but there's something about street music that really sends me, and I will sit and watch a busker forever.
I was coming out of a yoga class here in the California desert in La Quinta, which is a pretty refined little suburb of Palm Springs and Indio. And in the parking lot is a guy sitting there with a little dog playing a violin, just instrumentals, and he's got his violin case open. So I put five bucks in the case and took a few pictures of him and put them on my Instagram, and I was happy to do that for him. I couldn't do much more.
You know, I see buskers, like I said, who are playing live to track, not so spontaneous, playing kind of smooth jazz, not my thing, but I still appreciate sitting outside and the amount of nerve it takes just to really be within spitting distance of your audience.
Lawrence: I think that's an element of it that you've articulated well, that gives me that jolt every time I come across someone doing it as well. It's just the balls to be out there, and something you alluded to earlier, to be in sort of like a quasi-legal environment. Like there's an element of risk, because you don't really—especially if you're in a town you don't know—you don't know how tolerated it is. I always get a little fear for them of like, their money's on the ground, are they vulnerable? There's a very much "living outside the mainstream" romanticism that's easy to overlay on it as the observer.
Cary: Well, Mary Lou Lord told me a lot of stories. An attractive young female, for one thing, out in the London tube or in the French subways, and she told me of a kind of suspicious-looking guy who was hanging around. I think she described him as one-armed. He eventually urinated in her guitar case, took a pee in her guitar case. And by then she felt she'd seen everything.
I'm sure that there are those who get robbed. I mean, it's very easy to reach down when an artist is playing guitar and pilfer 35 bucks that might be hard-earned money in a musician's guitar case. There are all kinds of things, all kinds of risks that these guys took.
One of my favorites is Peter Case, who's a pretty respected singer-songwriter. Prior to being a solo singer-songwriter, he was in a kind of new wave band called the Plimsouls, who had a couple of early alternative rock hits and were signed to Geffen. And before that, he was in a band called the Nerves.
But he was a guy from Buffalo, I think just after high school, put a thumb out on the highway and hitchhiked to San Francisco from Buffalo—a long hitchhike right there. You're putting yourself in danger, even in an age where hitchhiking was maybe safer than it is now. He made his way to San Francisco and was homeless, completely homeless.
So here's this guy who probably came from a middle-class enough background, but a rebel, and had this dream and went to San Francisco. Went to a junkyard and found a car, an abandoned rusty car, and that was his home—that's where he slept. He found a place to take showers, and he would busk every day, either on Fisherman's Wharf or sometimes out by the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
He told me he met all kinds of San Francisco characters. Allen Ginsberg came out of the City Lights Bookstore and sat in with him. They'd never met, but he knew who Allen Ginsberg was, and Allen Ginsberg sat in. There are all kinds of stories like that, all kinds of people.
Wildman Fisher was—I'm probably not out of school by calling him mentally ill. He was called that by many people who've written about him or spoke to me about him. He had some issues, and he was in Los Angeles and would busk, sometimes just spontaneously bellowing. You could tell that he had some issues. He had a song, "I Used to Be Shy, But I'm Not Shy Anymore," and he would just recite that ceaselessly.
Frank Zappa found him, and Frank Zappa was starting a label for other weird artists in addition to himself that he would find—weird or unusual or unconventional artists. So he signed Wildman Fisher to his Bizarre or maybe it was Straight. He had two labels, Bizarre/Straight Records. He also signed the GTOs, who were groupies.
I know one of the GTOs, a former groupie known as Miss Pamela Des Barres. She's actually a friend of mine, and I attend great parties in her backyard in the San Fernando Valley. I drive into town for those. And she was telling me about Wildman Fisher and how he would sometimes just bellow, but it turns out that the GTOs, her band of groupies, and Wildman Fisher had a gig together at a place that sounds a little ambitious—maybe there was a third act or maybe the headliner on the bill, but this was the Shrine Auditorium in LA, best known for the Grammys and the Oscars at some point before they went to different venues.
Wildman Fisher was on stage doing his Wildman Fisher act and actually left the stage, walked through the theater, and continued to sing outside the theater. Everybody's still in their seats, but he's outside singing, and a few people followed him to see where he went. He preferred the outdoors to the indoors. Here he is in a very legitimate Los Angeles theater.
So you have all kinds, and it was great to hear all these stories. I'm sorry that I didn't get to see some of these things with my own eyes and ears.
Lawrence: Yeah. You mentioned early on about the changes to Maxwell Street, which we could do an hour just talking about the changes in American cities and what that's done to various cultural groups and the arts. There's something else you referred to, which was the cultural significance or the additive nature of having music on the streets and how cities have come to acknowledge that and realize it.
Obviously, there's a spectrum between being tolerant and actually supportive, and it manifests in different ways. Like I go to some cities and you see the busker has the official, some kind of permit or pass or something. And then other places, it's clearly much more tolerated than supported. I wonder, could you talk about in present day, to the extent you know, at the extremes, what would be a place that's like, "You know what, this is a pretty good place to be a busker," and then a place that seems hostile and doesn't get it?
Cary: I would say the subways are probably rough, although people certainly appreciate, on their way to work, getting a little bit of entertainment and maybe a smile, and maybe their experience in commuting to work is a little richer.
But I get the sense that New Orleans actually appreciates what they have. It was hard fought. It didn't come naturally. There was—I met an attorney who was a busking advocate. I didn't meet her, but I interviewed her on the phone. There was a guy from an organization that supports buskers among other musicians, a musician advocacy group specific to New Orleans.
But New Orleans has certainly found that a lot of its color, a lot of its human interest, a lot of its tourism is music. People go to New Orleans, they expect music of all different kinds from Dixieland to R&B to whatever it is Trombone Shorty does, all kinds of music really. But they've taken stock, and it's not even permitted anymore—I mean, it's permitted, but it's not "permitted," meaning that I think you can pretty much just set up within reason.
Sometimes there are laws in terms of decibels or amplification or drums, but I think the cities are finding that they are richer for it. Like I say, in this day and age of being able to order almost anything from Amazon, what's going to bring people to stores? Maybe they go to the big box store that's on the edge of town—what's going to bring them to the downtown section? Maybe their offices are there, but a lot of people telecommute. Why go downtown? Why go to Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica? Why go to the Drag in Austin or South Congress in Austin?
It's the experience. It's the community of being among members of your species, and what makes that richer than performance and music? I've seen poets, I've seen orators, but there's something about music that really makes you smile, makes you feel a little bit better about humanity, makes you feel a little better about your day, makes you feel a little bit better about being downtown and seeing a lot of foreign signs on storefronts.
So I think cities are taking stock. I wish my hometown of Chicago would take stock with Maxwell Street. And in fact, there is a makeshift, ersatz new Maxwell Street that isn't really on Maxwell Street. It's on Des Plaines Street. I don't know. I've been there once. It didn't really impress me. I think there were some musicians, not blues, but the city has evolved. The city is Latino now. The city is all kinds of things. And there were all kinds of musicians representing a rainbow of ethnicities and backgrounds, but it wasn't Maxwell Street with the old decrepit buildings and the famous deli that was in The Blues Brothers and the record store where you could buy Little Walter 78s for a buck.
To have experienced that at age 16 was priceless. And I probably wouldn't have if not for a father who grew up experiencing that and really thought he was showing me—thought he was taking me slumming, you know, in effect. Maybe he was, but it changed my life.
And I hope maybe I changed a life or two. If Arvella Gray got a coffeehouse gig or two as a result of this, or if he got a few more interviews to do, if the guy at the Chicago TV news—if I could have helped accomplish any of that, then with this book, if I can help bring a little bit of consciousness and appreciation for life on the streets...
You know, I'm a city kid. I live in the California desert now, in a gated community. It's not exactly a city street, but when I walk through Palm Springs and I see an old man with an accordion doing "Lady of Spain" on the accordion, I just sort of smile and give him a buck. I love street life. I love walking downtowns of cities, and long may there be downtowns and long may there be busking.
Cary Baker
Cary Baker is a writer based in Southern California. Born on Chicago’s South Side, he began his writing career at age 16 with an on-spec feature about Chicago street singer Blind Arvella Gray for the Chicago Reader. His return to writing follows a 42-year hiatus during which Baker, by 1984 based in Los Angeles, directed publicity for six labels (including Capitol and I.R.S.) and two of his own companies, working with acclaimed artists and labels such as R.E.M., Bonnie Raitt, the Smithereens, James McMurtry, the Mavericks, Bobby Rush, Willie Nile, and Omnivore Recordings. Prior to his PR years, Baker wrote for the Chicago Reader, Creem, Trouser Press, Bomp!, Goldmine, Billboard, Mix, Illinois Entertainer, and Record magazine. He has also written liner notes for historical reissues from Universal, Capitol-EMI, Numero Group and Omnivore. He has been a voting member of the Recording Academy since 1979. His first book, Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking & Street Music, was published in November 2024.
