Maxwell Street lives mostly in memory. Yes, it is still a city byway, south of Roosevelt Road and running east and west for less than a mile, on either side of Halsted Street. It is also affixed to “New Maxwell Street,” located nearby, open on the last Sundays of every month into October.
But for a couple of generations, it’s still alive, and is vividly so for Cary Baker. He can remember himself as a teenager in 1970, leaving his suburban home with his father one Sunday morning to go to Maxwell Street. They had come to see the open-air flea market that flourished in the area then, a city strip that had given their Jewish European immigrant forbearers a place to shop for bargains.
Baker remembers: “All around, we could hear merchants hawking. And then there was music ..
.” The first street singer he heard and saw was Blind Arvella Gray, standing on Halsted Street and playing “John Henry,” a song, Baker writes, “that seemed to have no beginning and no end.” He and his father spent an hour listening, asked Gray for his phone number and the teenager would soon write a story about Gray that was published in one of the early editions of the Chicago Reader , on Jan.
7, 1972. “The Blues Over a Tin Cup” was the title of that article and its creation makes for one of the many lively stories in a spectacularly entertaining and enlightening book “Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking & Street Music.” Baker has written an important book that explores a sadly o.
