Sundowners – Chicago Country Legends
Maybe every city didn’t have a band like the Sundowners, but every city should have. From the late 1950s through the late ’80s, the trio of lead guitarist Don Walls, rhythm guitarist Bob Boyd and bassist Curt Delaney was a Stetson-and-buckskin mainstay of Chicago’s decaying downtown Loop, drawing a crowd that encompassed drunks and dancers, businessmen and tourists, vagrants who stumbled over from the nearby bus station and the occasional musical hipster.
They were not only country before country was cool, they were alternative in an era when alternative country was unimaginable. As rock was becoming more progressively FM, the Sundowners were proudly AM, bringing the hits of the day to the bandstand that night while recycling favorites from the recent past. Walls’ nimble virtuosity provided the instrumental signature, while the trio’s harmonies evoked an urban echo of the Sons of the Pioneers.
According to the liner notes of this live (and lively) collection by Chicago Sun-Times writer Dave Hoekstra, the Sundowners’ repertoire came to encompass more than 15,000 tunes, almost half of which they’d be likely to play over the course of a year. When you’re working night after night from sunset until last call, you run through a lot of material, particularly if you’re determined to keep the music fresh for yourself as well as for the audience.
Thus, any given night at the bar might include the Beatles’ “Something”, the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”, Bobby Darin’s “Things”, and the soundtrack theme “Around The World” amid a selection of Webb Pierce and Don Gibson classics (the sort of range surveyed by the city’s Top 40 stations during the Sundowners’ early tenure). And though the trio brought a twang and a playful spirit to almost everything it touched, the Skid Row balladry of “Sidewalks Of Chicago” here shows a soulfulness as deep as “Dark End Of The Street”.
Except for a late-’80s studio rendition of Robbie Fulks’ “Cigarette State” that caps the collection, these 23 selections span eleven years, beginning in 1960. Yet this live set sounds as if it could have been recorded in one night, a night that has never ended in Chicago’s collective memory.