Tag: Civil War

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North Carolina

Here’s a list of famous people from North Carolina:

  • John Coltrane
  • Dolley Madison
  • The Dale Earnhardts
  • Cecil B. DeMille
  • Billy Graham
  • Sugar Ray Leonard
  • Roberta Flack
  • Thomas Wolfe
  • Andrew Johnson, sort of.
  • Andrew Jackson, though he’s probably from South Carolina
  • James Taylor
  • Doc Watson
  • James K. Polk, sort of.
  • Nina Simone
  • Richard Petty
  • Earle Scruggs
  • Andy Griffith
Hugo Van Gelderen, John Coltrane, 1963.

I left out Soupy Sales, but you get the idea. It’s not a bad list. It’s a very respectable list, and you might come up with people I left out, but here’s the thing: this is not a list that you look at and say that the sons and daughters of North Carolina have changed everything. It’s certainly had its effect on Nascar, and two Nascar movies, Days of Thunder and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, were filmed in North Carolina. That’s a full 24 hours of driving fury. And what state wouldn’t be proud to claim John Coltrane, Doc Watson, and Nina Simone?

Talledega Nights by-the-way is the better movie. After Bull Durham, it may be the most quotable sports movie ever.

Of the three presidents on the list, Polk, Johnson, and Jackson, two were born in North Carolina but are known as Tennesseans, and the third, Jackson, was almost certainly born in South Carolina (and is also known as a Tennessean). North Carolina seems to claim him out of desperation. The state’s most important historical event was the flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were from Ohio.

Matthew Brady, James K. Polk, Tennessean, 11th President, daguerrotype, 1849.

North Carolina was always one of our scruffiest states. It is, oddly enough, one of the earliest settled, or attempted settled anyway, by Europeans, first in 1524 by the Spaniard Juan Pardo with a string of forts (that promptly disappeared), and then by the British with two colonies on Roanoke Island, one in 1586 that was abandoned, and one in 1590 that disappeared, taking with it North America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare.

North Carolina wasn’t that far from the Virginia colonies, just across the state border, but the coastline was inhospitable because the Outer Banks effectively blocked navigation, and a monstrous bog, aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp, blocked immigration from English-inhabited Virginia except by the desperate–run-away indentured servants and other rif-raff. Through the Colonial Period North Carolina seems to have been settled mostly by tax scofflaws, pirates, and Quakers, and the former finally ran out the Quakers. Lack of transportation and urban areas left it relatively isolated and poor. Until World War II it was probably our poorest state.

Rebeca Wynn, US Fish and Wildlife Service, The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, 2010,

I had a lot of ancestors who lived in North Carolina, and at least one, born in North Carolina in 1788, seems to have made it to Texas by 1846, the year after annexation and statehood. It’s too bad, too. If he’d only made it one year earlier I could claim membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I don’t know if there really is a Sons of the Republic of Texas, but I’m pretty sure there must be.

Even North Carolina’s literature seems scruffy. I suspect that nobody reads Look Homeword, Angel, any more. I read it years ago, and tried to read it again years later but couldn’t make it through. I remember it being about people who just seemed, well, scruffy. They weren’t evil enough to be bad, and were too mundane to be really memorable. The writing is supposed to be revolutionary, but that’s old hat. Even the newest, most popular North Carolina novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who is raised by wolves in the Great Dismal Swamp, or near enough. I don’t think there are actually wolves. Kris’s book club read it, but I haven’t.

Satellite photo, The Outer Banks, 2009, NOAA.

I’ve fished in North Carolina once before, almost 30 years ago. We fished on the Davidson, in Western North Carolina. Originally this was brook trout territory, but it’s been stocked for years with rainbows and browns and the rainbows and browns have reproduced, spread, and crowded out the brookies, so that the brookies are now found mostly in small high country streams. Twenty-odd years ago I caught my first brook trout in North Carolina, a tiny thing, up above a waterfall where the rainbows couldn’t make lunch of him. We’re fishing for trout again this time, or possibly smallmouth, near the mountain town of Cashiers.

Any smallmouth east of the Appalachians are also transplants.

I’m guessing that there is a saltwater fishery along the Atlantic, and South Carolina is well-known for its redfish, but we won’t make it as far as the coast. After we fish near Bristol, Tennessee (home of Nascar’s Bristol Motor Speedway), we drive south and a bit west back to North Carolina. Shouldn’t work that way, but there you are.

When the Carolinas split in 1729, North Carolina had 6,000 slaves, while South Carolina had 32,000. Tobacco was North Carolina’s big crop, but it was not an industrial agriculture crop like cotton. There were slaves though, in Eastern North Carolina. The Carolina Quakers actively opposed slavery, which was one of the reasons they were impolitely encouraged to leave. By the 1860 census there were 331,059 slaves in North Carolina, or about 33% of the total population, compared to 57% of the population of South Carolina. There were Confederate states with fewer slaves, but they were western, newer states, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida. In 1860, Florida’s total population was only 140,000. I suspect that a significant part of North Carolina’s enslaved were centered in the southern rice-growing region around Cape Fear, North Carolina’s only port, and where Virginia immigrants had gathered along the coast.

During the Civil War North Carolina was relatively untouched physically, but more Confederate soldiers came from North Carolina than any other state, 130,000, more than 12% of its total population. More than 40,000 Confederate North Carolinians died during the War, about half from disease. As with Tennessee, there was considerable Union sympathy in the Appalachian portion of the state, and about 8,000 North Carolinians fought for the Union, 5,000 black, 3,000 white.

North Carolina’s population today is estimated at 10,488,084, and it’s grown consistently and fast since about 1880, when the population was about 1.4 million. It is our 9th most populous state, after Georgia but before Michigan. About 68.5% of the population is non-Hispanic white, and 21.5% African American, which leaves about 10% for everybody else. About 8.4% of the total population is Hispanic. It’s a pretty place, with a hospitable climate as long as no hurricanes blow in from the Atlantic, and I suspect a lot of the North Carolina’s growth is about it being a pretty place with a hospitable climate. People from Houston retire there.

Rivers Langley, Earl Scruggs, 2005, licensed under Creative Commons license, unedited.

It is still not a wealthy state, ranked 41st, with an average annual income in 2018 of $53,888. I suspect that there are greater disparities in income in North Carolina than there are, say, in Missouri, ranked 40, or Tennessee, ranked 42, but that’s just a hunch. Like I said, affluent people from Houston retire there. Affluent people from Houston don’t retire to Missouri.

North Carolina may be one of the states that decides the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Biden needs about 40 electoral votes over what Hillary received in 2016, which means that unless he wins Texas and Florida he has to win some combination of three larger states that Hillary didn’t win. Of the states that were close in 2016, Pennsylvania (20) and North Carolina (15) would just about do it.

In 2016 President Trump took North Carolina 49.83% to 46.17%, but of all the state electoral maps I’ve looked at, North Carolina’s may be the strangest. It doesn’t appear to be driven so much by an urban/rural or a white/black split as an affluent/less affluent split, but that’s a wild guess. Maybe it’s that North Carolina has become such a refuge, and the refugees aren’t collected in big cities. Anyway, it would take a lot more delving than I’m willing to do to figure it out. Here’s the map:

By Ali Zifan, Wikipedia.

Look up a map of the state and compare the two. It’s a strange jumble of who voted how, and not obviously explained by the usual splits.

One of North Carolina’s Senate seats, held by Republican Tom Tillis, is up in 2020, and the race is generally considered a toss-up, though current polling shows the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Current polling shows Biden leading Trump 49% to 48%, which is meaningless.

And by the way, the most quotable sports movie, Bull Durham, was set in North Carolina. I will almost certainly watch Bull Durham again before the weird short season baseball business kicks off next week, and we head to North Carolina.

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Tennessee

It used to be a joke that every Texan went broke in Tennessee before they came to Texas. I suspect my ancestors kinda went broke other places as well, but still, many Texans have a soft spot for Tennessee. T for Texas, T for Tennessee.

Tennessee looms unnaturally large in our collective history. Some random stuff:

  • The Trail of Tears.
  • Davy Crockett, Sam Houston
  • Martin Luther King’s assassination.
  • The Grand Ol’ Opry, Sun Records, Stax Records, Beale Street, Nashville.
  • Andrew Jackson.
  • Dolly Parton
  • The TVA.
  • Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Fort Donelson.
  • Nashville Cats.
  • Andrew Johnson.
  • The Smoky Mountains.
  • Al Gore.
  • The Scopes Trial.
  • Elvis.

You’d think with all that stuff going on, there would be good histories of Tennessee, but I haven’t found one. Stuff seems to be dated or episodic, as if the history itself is too big. There are lots of little histories, histories of Andrew Jackson or the Scopes Trial, or the battles of the War in the West, or individual biographies, or histories of East Tennessee, but nothing general seems satisfactory.

There are really three parts of Tennessee, represented by the three stars in the circle on the Tennessee flag, and maybe that’s the problem: the state’s schizophrenic. From the west, Memphis is that joke about Mississippi; what are Mississippi’s two largest cities? New Orleans and Memphis. It was the largest inland cotton market in the South. It’s on the Gulf Coastal Plain that runs from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River to Southern Illinois, as much the Delta as Arkansas or Mississippi are the Delta, flat, rich; the land of cotton.

Marion Post Walcott, May 1940, Cotton Carnival, Memphis Tennessee, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

Even today here is no city more Southern than Memphis, population 651,073, with a metro population of 1,371,110. It seems everyone in Memphis is either white or black, without the polyglot of people and cultures that I’m used to. It’s a lovely city, with ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, good ribs, and a rich cultural history, but it’s also a damaged city. It never seems to have recovered from the murder of Martin Luther King. As of 2010, Memphis proper was 27.5% non-Hispanic white, 63.3% African-American, 6.5% Hispanic, 1.6% Asian. The metro population evens out a bit, with 45% non-hispanic white, and 47% black.

When I was in college I ate my first bagel in Memphis, on my way to backpack to Clingman’s Dome in the Smokies.

Memphis Minnie, 1930.

Central Tennessee is higher than West Tennessee (though not Klingman’s Dome), with the Highland Rim surrounding the Nashville Basin. Higher is a relative term. The Highland Rim is rarely much higher than 1,100 feet. It’s hill country, farm country, Nashville.

USGS, Nashville Basin, 1988.

Nashville, with a city population of 670,820 and a metro population of 1,959,495, is growing. One doesn’t go there any more just to make records. In some ways it is the reverse image of Memphis, thriving, maybe even modern, maybe even cosmopolitan. It’s 58.6% non-Hispanic white, 28.6% African American, and 3.5% Asian. 9% of the total population is Hispanic.

Daniel Schwein, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, licensed under Cretive Commons license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Nashville is known principally for that pancake place over near Vanderbilt, the Pancake Pantry, and a pretentious but well-acted Robert Altman movie. Nothing else.

East Tennessee is defined by Appalachia, with the Blue Ridge on the border with North Carolina, the Ridge and Valley Appalachians to the west, and The Cumberland Plateau bordering middle Tennessee. By 1794, I had two ancestors, a Hatcher and a Crowson, in Wears Valley, near Sevierville and Pigeon Forge. There is still a Hatcher Mountain and a Crowson Cove in Wears Valley in the Ridge and Valley region, but my direct ancestor (and their descendent), William John Hatcher, was in Sullivan County, Missouri by 1850. In 1861, William John volunteered for the Missouri Infantry, on the side of the Union.

You’d think that would be odd, but Eastern Tennessee was a Union hotbed: there weren’t many slaves in those hills and hollers. Eastern Tennessee is still mostly white. Knoxville’s population is essentially 17% black and 83% white, with everybody else just a wee bit of lagniappe. Historically it was also poor, though it seems to be doing well enough now. This is Dolly Parton country. Maybe Dolly is a cousin.

Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, 1968. Pre-1978, no copyright mark.

In East Tennessee, Scott County seceded from the Confederacy and formed its own Free and Independent State of Scott, and didn’t officially rejoin Tennessee until 1986. Pater William John would have served the Union at Shiloh, Corinth, in the Atlanta Campaign, and in Sherman’s March to the Sea, on the opposite side of at least three other second great grandfathers, but as like as not on the same side as his Tennessee brothers and cousins. I’m glad my great-great grandfathers were not better shots. Weirdly, while I knew from my grandparents that a number of their grandparents fought for the Confederacy, I didn’t find out that William John fought for the Union until a couple of years ago. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe that was the sort of thing one kept to oneself in the post-Reconstruction South.

But things change. I’m proud of my Grandfather William John, and East Tennessee is no longer a hotbed of Northern sympathy. East Tennessee along with the rest of Tennessee voted 60% for President Trump in 2016, with only the two most populous counties, Davidson and Shelby, and a majority black county, Hayward, voting for Hillary Clinton.

Ali Zifan, Wikimedia Commons.

Which reminds me of why this came up in the first place. In two weeks we’re supposed to fish in far northeast Tennessee, for trout on the South Holston and Watauga Rivers. We’re driving. I picked it so that I could see Wears Valley, and Shiloh, and because we go from there to visit friends in North Carolina. It’ll be our first road trip, really our first trip of any kind, since the pandemic began. We’ll see if we actually go.

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Delaware

Aaron Arrowsmith and Samuel Lewis, Arrowsmith’s 1804 Map of Delaware, 1804.

Delaware has a population of less than 1 million people, but at only 1,982 square miles, it has 469 people per square mile. That’s a lot. It is the sixth densest state. Montana, which has a few more people, has only seven people per square mile. Standing in your mile of Delaware you can rub elbows with 462 people you’d never meet in Montana.

All of the states denser than Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland, are its neighbors. There are other states with more people, but crammed into that northeast corridor are the densest states with the most people and the least land per person. One doesn’t choose Delaware for a wilderness experience.

Delaware ranks 49th in total area–I suppose Rhode Island must be last. There are three counties in Delaware, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. That’s it. Its largest city, Wilmington, is in the far north, with over half the state’s population and a population density of 1,312 people per square mile. Blacks make up 23% of Delaware’s population, whites 69.5%, Asians 4.1%, and everybody else the rest. About 8% of the whites are Hispanic.

Delaware is not a poor state. Its median annual income per household ranks 17th, at $64,805. Wealth though is tied to race. In Wilmington the median annual white household income is $60,772. The black median annual household income is about $47,500.

From Wikimedia Commons, User Golbez, Map of the Slave States 1861.

On December 7, 1787, Delaware, then a slave state, was the first state to ratify the Constitution. In 1790 in Delaware there were 8,887 slaves, and 3,899 free blacks. The 1860 census listed only 1,798 slaves, of a total black population of 21,677, of a total Delaware population of 112,266. Delaware had not freed its slaves when the Civil War began, though attempts had been made in its legislature and there was a strong abolition movement in the state. Its slaves were finally freed when the 13th Amendment ending slavery was ratified in 1865, after the Civil War.

Gratuitous Photograph of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

How did slavery get to Delaware? The Dutch of course. Delaware was originally a Swedish colony, founded in 1636. Just think what we’d have gained if the Swedes had held on. We’d own Volvos. We’d have an excuse to post gratuitous photographs of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman. We’d all be tall and blonde. The Dutch (who still controlled New York) kicked out the Swedes in 1655. The Dutch thought African slavery was the very thing, and had already established slavery in what would be New York, which finally outlawed slavery in the 1820s.

The Dutch conquered the New World Swedes in 1655, and were in turn conquered by the English in 1664. There was some fussing over whether Delaware belonged to Lord Baltimore as part of Maryland, or the Duke of York who deeded it to William Penn, but ultimately it went to Penn. The Delawarians and the Pennsylvanians weren’t well-suited for a long-term relationship, and by 1701 Penn had agreed to a separation, though they continued to share a governor.

Contemporary Portrait, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr 1577-1618. Baron De La Warr was English, not Native American.

A good name like Delaware should be Native American, but no. The Delaware Native Americans were the Leni Lenape, part of the Algonquins, and were also located in New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. They apparently didn’t observe state lines. By 1670 the Lenape were mostly gone, absorbed, killed by disease or otherwise, or pushed west. The Tribes of the Delaware Nation are now in Oklahoma. There were also Nanticoke people, who either moved west with the Lenape or north to Canada, but some remained in Delaware, and settled near the Indian River. The Nanticoke Indian Association is recognized as a nonprofit corporation by the state, which likes nothing better than a good corporation.

The Delaware Tribe in Oklahoma sports the same name as the state, the river, and the bay, and all of ’em were named for the first governor of Virginia, Thomas West, the Third Baron De La Warr. Delaware Indians must possess a finely honed sense of irony.

Physically Delaware is flat, coastal, and temperate. It has about 45 inches of rain a year, with average temperatures ranging from 76 degrees in summer to 32 degrees in winter, with winter temperatures along the Atlantic Coast averaging 10 degrees warmer in winter and l0 degrees cooler in summer.

Delaware Geological Survey.

Delaware is the 6th flattest state, one flatter than Kansas. The highest point in the state, the Ebright Azimuth, is 447.85 feet above sea level, or at least it was before the seas started rising. I guess now either all things are relative or the point from which we measure sea level is underwater..

Delawarians tend to vote Democratic, it is Joe Biden’s state and both senators and its congresswoman are Democratic, but even in Delaware there is a rural/urban divide. In 2016 the more urban New Castle County voted for Clinton; the less populous southern counties voted for President Trump. Like I said, all things are relative. It’s not like Sussex County’s 165 people per square mile qualifies as ranch land.

We were going to lump our trip to Delaware together with our trip to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but getting ready we both read John McPhee’s The Founding Fish, which is McPhee’s paean to shad. Terry Peach at A Marblehead Flyfisher said that the shad most reliably run in the Brandywine River for the two weeks surrounding Mother’s Day, this year May 10, so now we’re going May 17. After all, who wouldn’t want to fish the Brandywine? Of course it doesn’t run through Hobbiton until somewhat further north than where we’re fishing. We’ll probably manage two breakfasts anyway.

Shad. If everything works we’re going to fish for shad.

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Illinois Playlist

What we took.

We packed to skip the baggage claim in Chicago. We flew in early on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day looking for things we’d never seen.

The only specialized fishing gear we took were polarized lenses. Our guides, Midwest Waters Anglers, provided all the gear, and it was great gear.

What I lost, Where we didn’t go.

I lost my beloved Bonefish & Tarpon Trust Yeti thermos. I really liked that Thermos.

I wish we’d had time to go to Springfield for the Abraham Lincoln Museum. We could have easily spent more time in Chicago.

What we ate.

By some measures Houston is now the most ethnically diverse city in the US, but that’s somewhat disingenuous. It treats all white people as a lump, which is like treating all Asians and Asian Americans as a lump, or treating all Africans and African Americans as a lump. Chicago’s story is in part a story of 19th and 20th century first-generation Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Welsh, and Jewish immigrants, white immigration that wasn’t from England via New England–the immigrants in The Jungle are Lithuanian. In 2019 the nativist impulse is aimed at immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In 1850 it was the anti-Catholic No-Nothings opposed to Irish and German Catholic immigration. Things never change.

Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing, lithograph, 1854, Sarony & Co., lithographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. American political prints, 1766-1876. From Wikipedia. He looks a lot like Lord Byron.

As of 2010, Chicago is 31.7% non-Hispanic whites, 32.9% black or African American, 5.5% Asian, and 13.3% Hispanic, and 16.1% mixed or other, but there are lots of ethnic traditions not covered in those numbers. We wanted Chicago ethnic food, and got a list of restaurants from our friend Tom, who knows these things. He said that there were three great ethnic food cities in the US, New York, Chicago, and Houston, and that the hard part of the list for Chicago was coming up with stuff we didn’t have in Houston. It’s a great list, even if we only made it to three of the places. Some of Tom’s notes are included in quotes:

  • Min Hing Cuisine – “great dim sum for breakfast (6 kinds of shrimp dumplings is good enough for me).” We went there straight from the airport. Chinese are about 1.6% of Chicago’s population, and first got there before 1860 with the railroads. The population boomed in the 1950s and 60s.
  • Parachute – “fusion Korean American, in the best way.” This place has a Michelin star, and seems to be everyone’s favorite restaurant, Alinea be damned. Make reservations in advance. We didn’t make reservations, and getting in on a Saturday night without a reservation might be harder than catching steelhead. We didn’t catch any Illinois steelhead either.
  • Shokran – “Moroccan kebabs and salads, also tangines and couscous. Cash only. BYOB.”
  • Staropolska or Lutnia Polish – About 6.7% of Chicago is Polish, with Polish the third language, after English and Spanish. We ate at Staropolska, just around the corner from St. Hyacinth Basilica. The young blonde waitress with the Polish accent was proud that it was the oldest Polish restaurant in Chicago. It could use some freshening, but that might ruin the vibe, and the food was great and the service was great.
Staropolska, cabbage rolls and potato pancakes. That red sauce seemed to be heavily paprikad, and was outstanding.
  • Jibek Jolu – “dumplings and noodles . . . Uighur.”
  • Sayat-Nova – “Armenian. Typical middle eastern fare . . . ” It was also in the middle of the Miracle Mile, and we went on the Sunday night of a long weekend when there was still plenty of shopping to be done. After some terrified driving we found a parking garage ($26 for a bit more than an hour, and well worth it). Kris loved Sayat-Nova, and said I have to ask Tom for recommendations wherever we go. I wish Tom could have helped out in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Sayat-Nova. Lamb meatballs in yoghurt and mint sauce.
  • Little Bucharest Bistro – “quality Central European food, excellent service.” Romanian. We didn’t go, but the descriptions on the internet were great. It wasn’t far from Staropolska.
  • Birrieria Zaragoza – “fast casual Mexican all about goat.” The Mexican population is the fastest growing population in Chicago, so it made sense to include something, but it broke Tom’s rule, sort of. I don’t know of anyplace in Houston that specializes in goat.

The best thing about ethnic Chicago restaurants? Other than the food of course. I could wear my stylish fishing clothes, the ones designed by the fashion-forward stylists at Patagonia, to any of them, which I did.

If that wasn’t enough of a list, Tom provided a supplement: “Ghareeb Nawaz Indo-Pakistani. San Soo Gob San-Korean. Galit-Israeli-Middle Eastern. Kaboobi Persian Grill (North side – our favorite). Cabra Peruvian (Rooftop restaurant). If you have time for breakfast before you leave, make it to Dove’s Luncheonette….”.

Books, Movies, TV.

There are tons of movies from Chicago, and we watched The Blues Brothers, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables. Pretty good Chicago movies. We never watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I may be too old for it now.

Mostly I read about Lincoln. I wonder how he managed to govern so well without Tweets. This is a good time to ponder Lincoln, and there’s a ton of stuff out there. Sometimes we get better leaders than we deserve. Sometimes apparently we don’t.

I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Auggie March. I had tried to read Bellow before, but didn’t quite get it. This time was better. I tried to read The Jungle, but found it too painful. I listened to a lot of Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels, but never did figure out how to pronounce Warshawski’s name, which is a weak and obscure joke about the inevitable unlikable character trope in every novel. If they can’t pronounce her name, they’re almost certainly the villain. I listened to some Dresden File novels by Jim Butcher, but didn’t think they were nearly as amusing as when I’d listened to them years ago. Michael Harvey wrote some good Chicago mysteries, and I listened to those when I got tired of the others.

Donuts.

We picked up Polish pastries at Kurowski Sausage Shop, pretzel-like crescents lightly filled with an unidentifiable jam, but I was too intimidated to brave the meat case. On Sunday morning we made a quick drive to Oak Park for Donuts at Firecakes Donuts and a quick visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright studio. The donuts were just fine, and I wish we’d had time to look at the scattered Wright houses. Next time.

There are Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere in Chicago. Chicago should do better.

Playlist.

This was a long list, so it’ll be pretty general.

Chicago’s population is 32.9% non-Hispanic African or African American. The percentage of African American population in Houston, a Southern city with significant historic black communities, is only 22.9%. For the Houston metropolitan area, Houston plus the suburbs, the number drops slightly, to 21%, but for Chicago 32.9% plunges to 17% when you add in the suburbs.

The two cities are of roughly the same size, but their largest growth occurs about a century apart. The historic African American population in Houston has its origin in slavery, but much of the dispersion from the city into the suburbs occurred after the Civil Rights Movement, and Blacks apparently moved out to the suburbs in about the same numbers as they stayed in Houston. In Chicago, the boom in African American population occurred in the great migration, from 1910 to 1960, and plenty of movement to the suburbs occurred largely before the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks apparently stuck to (or were confined to) the City.

Why this is kicking off the music playlist may not be obvious, but there is a lot of great music out of Chicago’s African American community. There are three cities most responsible for the origination of jazz: New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. The earliest migration of the Blues was from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. This is Great Migration stuff, and stuff that shaped us profoundly.

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, 1925, Chicago

There’s another odd thing about Illinois music, there’s a surprising number of good folk/country/Americana musicians out of Illinois. Illinois is our second flattest state after Florida, tucked in as a drainage between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. It hides all that flatness with a combination of skyscrapers and trees. Anyway, all that flatness makes for great farmland, and except for Chicago, this is Midwest farm country. It’s no surprise that farm country makes for country music and Republican voters.

Jazz

I probably should have done better, but Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s first recordings are from Chicago. The singers Dee Alexander and Johnny Hartman, and Herbie Hancock.

Blues

Of course the Blues Brothers was set in Chicago. Where else would it be? All of these musicians were from, cycled through, wrote about, or sang about Chicago: Robert Johnson, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jimmy Rogers (no, not that Jimmie Rodgers), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Little Walter, Luther Allison, Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Son Seales, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Earl Hooker, Freddie King . . . Is Bo Diddley the Blues? We talked about going to a blues bar on Saturday, but we’re old, things start late, and fishing starts early. Next time.

Dovydenas, Jonas,  Muddy Waters, Checkerboard Lounge, 423 E. 43rd St., Chicago; Chicago, Illinois, 1977, Library of Congress, Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection.

Folk/Country/Americana

John Prine, Allison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, Son Volt, Wilco, Steve Goodman.

Has there ever been a sadder song than Steve Goodman’s A Dying Fan’s Last Request? Not only was Goodman in fact dying, he was a Cub’s fan. There is nothing more pathetic than the Chicago Cubs, but it’s still one of the best baseball songs ever.

Scattered and Inconsisten Rock

In early adolescence, I thought Chicago was the greatest band ever. I liked the brass, I liked the politics, I liked the guitar. I hadn’t listened to them since. Color My World was probably the first song I learned to play on the guitar, though in my defense it was probably before it became the most important high school prom song ever written. I still think 25 or 6 to 4 was a pretty great song. Pretty good song. Ok, I still like it.

Reo Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins.

When Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville came out in the 90s it got great reviews and I bought a copy, probably without actually reading the reviews. We were on a family car trip and I started the CD in the car. Some song came on, Flower? Fuck and Run? Anyway, it was really not age appropriate, either for me or my children. This trip was probably the second time I’d listened to it. It’s pretty raw in a “I grew up in Chicago suburbs and graduated from Oberlin” sort of way. It may be age appropriate for my children now, but it’s still not age appropriate for me.

Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville.jpg

Random Stuff

  • Allister, Somewhere Down on Fullerton.
  • Mobstability, Crook County (Bond Crusher Mix).
  • Rhett Miller, The El.
  • The Lawrence Arms, A Guided Tour of Chicago.
  • Andrew Bird, Pulaski at Night. Good song.
  • Common, Chi-City.
  • Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town.
  • Graham Nash, Chicago/We Can Change the World.
  • Sufjan Stevens, Illinois.
  • Dan Fogalberg, Illinois.
  • Ben Folds, Effington.
  • Twista, Crook County.
  • Kanye West, Homecoming
  • Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, Lake Shore Drive
  • Jim Croce, Bad Bad Leroy Brown.
  • Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler, Symphony #9 in D. The Chicago Symphony Center Orchestra Hall is magnificent.

Guitar.

Didn’t take one. A guy in the airport told me that he always checked his guitar, and convinced me that I could do the same with a good enough case. Kris thought that was a great idea. Stuffing a guitar in the overhead is a pain. I got back to Houston and ordered a new case.