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Chicago Hard Country
Bob Boyd of The Sundowners, the house band at the “Bar Double R,” once a subcultural and subterranean downtown Chicago institution, flipped through the pages of a songbook on a music stand and then, with his reading glasses set on the end of his nose, strummed his guitar and started singing “When I was a child my family would travel down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born….”
It was some drunken weeknight in give-or-take 1988, overstaying yet another happy hour, that I made my way down the long narrow staircase near the Greyhound station on Randolph Street to join the thin crowd at one of my favorite downtown bars and requested John Prine’s tree-hugging anthem “Paradise,” because for whatever reason at that moment I was feeling the continuity of a storied country music tradition in Chicago and I needed to see it up close and as big as life.
None of that scene is there, anymore. Not exactly, anyway. The Chicago music scene is still very much alive, in varied and diverse tributaries. The Hideout in Wicker Park had even acquired some of the graffiti-carved tables from the RR Ranch. But The Sundowners, the RR Ranch and the Greyhound station are all long gone — and as covid-19 continues to take its toll on music scenes around the world, it took John Prine from us on April 7, 2020.