By Bill Mahin
“It was approaching dawn,” he says. “We were standing around up on Chapel Hill trading songs. Michael McNevin sang ‘Jersey Jail,’ and there were sirens in the distance. There are never sirens in the middle of the night at Kerrville. Then Diane Chodkowski did ‘Fleur de Lis’ by Richard Shindell–an astounding piece of religious poetry written around the time he dropped out of the seminary. It stops time, it’s so beautiful. As she was finishing, chimes rang on the hill. Then Margo Hennebach sang a Susan Osborne prayer, ‘Mystery,’ a love song to God. When she finished, nobody spoke for about five minutes. I realized that this group of people respected the sacred. I’d never had that experience before. It was like some kind of weight lifted.
Folk music enjoyed its heyday in Chicago during the 1960s. Art Thieme, who recently released a Waterbug CD of live performances spanning his 30-year career, recalls the 60s as “a time when you could stay fed and drunk in Chicago just playing open stages in different clubs and bars. A lot of us did that. It kept body and soul together.” Thieme had his first paying gig in 1959. He was supposed to get 25 percent of the door. “One guy came in, paid his dollar cover. I went home with a quarter.”
Folk music is still played around town, of course, but not on the scale of those days. The scene that started in nightclubs like the Gate of Horn and the Earl of Old Town thrived well into the 1970s–Amazingrace, Holstein’s, Orphans, Somebody Else’s Troubles. Those places are all gone. One of the last holdouts, the No Exit coffehouse, just closed its doors.
Did everything they asked and more.
I’d be the wealthiest of men.
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Born in Gateshead-on-Tyne, in England’s industrial northeast, Killen started singing in public when he was 18. “What probably hooked me on the music was the history, what it said about my culture and other cultures,” he says. “I started performing to transfer that knowledge to other people. That has always been an important part of my singing, not just to stand there and make my voice sound beautiful but to give people a sense of, or some window into, the culture the song comes from.”
