Chicago's Hidden Country Music: It's worth the search for rustic fun and boot-kicking music in the Windy City

2012-09-30T00:00:00Z 2012-09-30T23:57:07Z Chicago's Hidden Country Music: It's worth the search for rustic fun and boot-kicking music in the Windy CityThe Associated Press The Associated Press
September 30, 2012 12:00 am  • 

Open the scruffy front door of a drab-looking corner tavern in Chicago on Friday evenings and suddenly you're in Texas, greeted by the rowdy twang of a genuine honky tonk band. Cowboy-booted couples of all ages two-step around the dimly lit scuffed wooden dance floor to the likes of Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, or one of the band's own drinking songs. "If I'm Not Drunk, I'm Not Drinking Today" is a crowd favorite.

In a city better known for the rarified sounds of a world-class symphony and legendary jazz and blues, there's a lively but almost hidden country music scene in Chicago.

This isn't the Nashville top 40 or overproduced pablum that you hear on commercial radio, or pay top-dollar to see in cavernous arenas. It's more old-timey country music, from honky-tonk to Rockabilly and Western Swing, and it's being resurrected by talented local bands like the five-man Hoyle Brothers, in otherwise nondescript venues like the Empty Bottle on Chicago's Western Avenue.

Sometimes there's a nominal cover charge, but for some gigs, like the Hoyle Brothers' Honky-Tonk Happy Hour, the music costs no more than whatever you feel like putting in the tip jar.


"I was surprised people were into it up here," McSpadden said before a recent gig. The band regularly attracts a good mix of tattooed hipsters, middle-aged professionals and gray-haired suburbanites, all drawn to the down-home sound.

The Bottle, on the edge of an old Ukrainian neighborhood, is better known for avant-garde late night bands, but the stalwart honky-tonk crowd has become a Friday night staple — McSpadden calls it almost like a weekly family reunion.

"Chicago is a host to a number of different types of music, and it's there for the taking and it's there if you look for it," said the Empty Bottle's self-described "head cheese," Bruce Finkelman.

On a recent Friday, a visitor from Naperville, a far western suburb, walked into the Bottle for the first time and commented, beaming, 'Wow, you could walk right by this place and never know it existed."

Same goes for Simon's, a divey tavern in trendy Andersonville five miles to the north, where you'll find another band popular among Chicago's country cognoscenti, the Western Elstons. Every other Wednesday night, they play a brand of Western swing so smooth and catchy that dancers somehow find room to twirl in the bar's narrow aisle.

A few blocks to the south, on a more working-class stretch of Clark Street, you could easily miss 40-year-old Carol's Pub, the granny of the city's country music scene. A little worn at the edges, Carol's still serves up pitchers of PBR and live country music four nights a week.




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