Chicago Hard Country

Carol’s Pub, a genuine surviving Chicago honky tonk (photo by Chrissy Slaton, Time Out Chicago)

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….”