Chicago Folk: Images of the Sixties Music Scene

Chicago Folk includes over 150 of Raeburn Flerlages’s photographs of folk musicians during the 1960s. No other book has presented a portrait of such a vibrant urban folk milieu, featuring popular performers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and so many others, but also a large number of traditional musicians, old and new, such as the New Lost City Ramblers, the Reverend Gary Davis, Booker White, Son House, Dock Boggs, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, Mother Maybelle Carter, and many other blues, bluegrass, old-time, Cajun, and gospel performers who appeared in Chicago and at the University of Chicago Folk Festival. These images capture the broad scope of folk musicians who were part and parcel of the 1960s folk music revival in Chicago and throughout the country.

Raeburn Flerlage was well known as Chicago’s foremost blues photographer. The concert performances, studio sessions, interviews and club shows he shot through the 1960s and early ‘70s captured some of America’s greatest blues artists at the pinnacle of their careers. While these images are now famous, the rest of his thousands of images are virtually unknown, and Chicago Folk brings these photos to light.

Chicago Folk is a follow-up to Chicago Blues (ECW Press, 2000), the first published collection of Flerlage’s photographs.