Overview: Down On The Corner is the story of music performed on the streets, in subways, in parks, in schoolyards, on the back of flatbed trucks, and beyond, from the 1920s to the present day.

Verdict: Drawing on years of interviews and eyewitness accounts, Down On The Corner: Adventures In Busking & Street Music introduces readers to a wide range of locations and a myriad of musical genres, from folk to rock’n’roll, the blues to bluegrass, doo-wop to indie rock.

Some of the performers he features — Lucinda Williams, Billy Bragg, The Violent Femmes — went on to become international stars; others settled into the curbs, sidewalks, and Tube stations as their workplace for the duration of their careers.

Anyone who has lived in or traveled through a city will have encountered street musicians of one kind or another. For the first time, veteran journalist and music-industry publicist Cary Baker tells the complete history of these musicians and the music they play, from tin cups and toonies to QR codes and PayPal.

In what is an engrossing read from start to finish, and one that not only lovingly educates the reader, but also strives to direct mental traffic towards investigating more out about each musician and organization named within its most gloriously sculpted, impassioned and diligently culled pages, sure, author Cary Baker might well be someone I have known professionally for a few decades, but nonetheless, I want to strive to say that his new book more than just allows us a small glimpse into the lives of the buskers who have enriched those that have already heard it’s daily existence with music and performance art, but moreover compels the reader to willingly immerse themselves with this street worn, street crafted culture.

Busking, as Cary himself notes, has been common in cities ‘as far back as ancient Rome,’ and goes on to highlight a wide variety of musicians such as Lawrence Wayne Wild Man Fischer (known for offering erratic, a cappella performances of new kinds of songs for a dime on the beaches of Los Angeles county and the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood), indie folk musician Mary Lou Lord (who started out performing as a busker in Boston), and even the legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (one of the country’s great storytellers, whose own story is itself a beautifully meandering tale of winding roads, chance encounters, and more), along with notable locations such as Chicago’s blues nexus, Maxwell Street (which in the mid-90’s, was home to street vendors and blues men, who often played outside the market on the weekends while shoppers went about their business).

One day around 1970, my father announced to me that he’d like to take me to Maxwell Street Market, an open-air flea market adjacent to Downtown Chicago. He wanted to show me where his parents used to take him shopping as a child. When he parked his car in the University Of Illinois lot, the first thing I heard, long before I could see where it was coming from, was the sound of a slide guitar—not just any guitar but a National steel resonator guitar. We followed the music and found ourselves standing on the west side of Halsted Street, midway between Roosevelt and Maxwell, where Blind Arvella Gray was playing the folk/blues song ‘John Henry’—a song that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Sensing that his audience was generally passing by rather than gathering around, Gray kept playing that one song for his entire shift. He’d even altered the lyrics to refer to the local streets. In that moment, I developed a lifelong affinity for the informality, spontaneity, and audience participation of busking. - Cary Baker.

In closing, and complete with a foreword by Dom Flemons, an American old-time music, Piedmont blues, and neotraditional country multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter, also proficient on the banjo, fife, guitar, harmonica, percussion, quills, and rhythm bones, Down On The Corner: Adventures In Busking & Street Music is a most wondrous read, it’s just as easy as that.

A highly informative, and enjoyable journey back in time, for the most part, although the here and now is explored also, and perhaps even, from some perspectives, a fly on the wall prose, where when expertly broken down into a series vignettes, unveils an ongoing coast-to-coast look at origin stories from Old Crow Medicine Show, Poi Dog Pondering and amongst others, the late rowdy raconteur Mojo Nixon, it also at the same time pays homage to now mainstream musicians, such as Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Madeleine Peyroux and more.

About the Author - Born on Chicago’s South Side, Cary Baker began his writing career at sixteen with an on-spec feature about Chicago street singer Blind Arvella Gray for the Chicago Reader. His return to writing follows a forty-two-year hiatus during which time he directed publicity for six record labels (including Capitol and IRS) and two of his own companies, working with acclaimed artists such as R.E.M., Bonnie Raitt, The Smithereens, James McMurtry, The Mavericks, Bobby Rush, Willie Nile, and more.

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. He lives in Southern California.

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