Cary Baker - Interview

  by Lisa Torem

published: 7 / 9 / 2025

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Article

Cary Baker’s new book, ‘Down on the Corner’ (Jawbone Press, £16.95), is all about buskers and street music, along with the musicians who play and busk all over the world. At his recent, well-attended launch at The Book Cellar in Chicago, the resettled Californian spoke passionately about “the blues,” unique urban artists and how he approached the project. Baker kicked off his career in high school, where he hosted a blues radio show called “Mojo”, after which in no time he’d added ‘Public Relations Director’ and ‘Music Director’ to his roles at the student station. His fanzine ‘Blue Flame’ went on to have subscribers all over the globe, among whom were Peter Guralnick who would go on to write legendary tomes on Elvis and many others. Even at that point street music would loom large: Baker’s first article was about Blind Arvella Gray, by then in his 60s, and whom he met while Gray was busking at Maxwell Street flea market. Baker went on to edit and write for Billboard, Creem and many more publications. His work is archived both at the University of North Carolina and in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. After moving into music publicity Baker launched his own company Conqueroo in 2004 with clients including James McMurtry, Nils Lofgren and Michael Nesmith. PB: Congratulations on a great read. Did anything surprise you during the writing process? CB: I came to be a busking appreciator in three ways: being taken to Maxwell Street at 16 by my father and seeing the remnants of the district’s blues scene, in particular, Blind Arvella Gray intrigued me no end. I wrote an on-spec article for the then-new Chicago Reader. That was the start of my writing career. Then after journalism school I was assigned a story on a Milwaukee band who were playing street corners, who were the Violent Femmes, and so I drove up to meet them. They performed for me beneath the theatre marquee at which they were discovered busking by The Pretenders. Finally, on moving to LA where I didn’t expect to see a rootsy busker, I chanced upon Ted Hawkins on my first stroll down Venice Boardwalk. He’d lived a rough and tumble life and would soon be signed by Geffen Records right off the Boardwalk. I saw others in 30 years of SXSW (the music and cultural festival in Austin, Texas) and in trips to New Orleans, Nashville and Clarksdale. I guess the revelation for me was that busking went back to ancient Greece and Rome as well as being prominent in early America: Benjamin Franklin was an occasional musician as well as an orator. I was tipped off to no fewer than 50 buskers and I got as many of them in the book as I could. I have plenty more in the event there’s a Volume Two. PB: Let’s talk about some of those people you interviewed. CB: Every busker I spoke with or whose lives I researched through eyewitness accounts came to the streets for different reasons, but there are commonalities. A few words that come to mind: Engaging: No matter why a musician plays in the streets, the subways, the parks or the beaches, the object is to engage, to move passers-by, to stop, take a moment, and if so moved and financially able, to reach into their pockets for a $1, $5 or $20 bill, or, nowadays, the QR code reader of their phone. Moreover, the street musicians I spoke to mentioned eye contact, conversation, even a smile, as being validation for putting themselves out there. Instinctive: The jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux was dropped off in front of a Parisian café by her bohemian single mom who spent time in Paris and Cannes and was dared to sink or swim as a performer. Ketch Secor of OId Crow Medicine Show made his debut a capella in front of a liquor store when his father went into the store to shop. He sang and tap-danced, learning to entertain at a very early age. Flexible: Mary Lou Lord began busking when she couldn’t get an official SXSW showcase, so she took to the corner of East 6th & Brazos Streets in downtown Austin and began a franchise for which she’d become even better known than if she’d had an official show. She was noticed and joined by the likes of Billy Bragg and Elliot Smith. She’s busked in the Tube in London, where she survived having her hard-earned spare change robbed by a one-armed man who then proceeded to pee into her guitar case. She still showed up for at the Tube station the next day. And Dom Flemons, a Carolina Chocolate Drop and musicologist who wrote the foreword to my book used to busk on 104-degree summer days in Phoenix. That’s commitment! Aspiring: The singer/songwriter and former Nerve and Plimsoul member Peter Case was a Buffalo native who hitchhiked across America to San Francisco, where he lived in a rusty abandoned car in a Sausalito junkyard while busking neo-beat style on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was on those streets that he met his first bandmates and even jammed with Allen Ginsberg. And Billy Bragg translated the ethos of busking – spontaneity – to his live performance at concerts and theatres, sometimes forgoing formal soundchecks which of course he never did as a busker. When Fantastic Negrito busked he’d already been signed to and dropped by Interscope Records under his real first name Xavier and had returned to Oakland to farm cannabis. It was only through tuning into his inner muse that he realized he was not a mainstream R&B artist but rather a blues/Americana artist, which led to his stage name, Fantastic Negrito. With that persona and his street-tested new material, he won NPR’s 2015 Tiny Desk competition and a Contemporary Blues Album award at the Grammys. PB: Did your interviewees have regrets about their careers? CB: No one mentioned regrets. But not everybody achieved precisely what they wanted out of it. I think he may have been pulling my leg, but the late musician and SiriusXM DJ Mojo Nixon (RIP) revealed in one of his final interviews that he – a Virginia native best known for his years in San Diego – had gone to London to busk in the Tube so that The Clash would discover him and ask him to join (which never happened, obviously, but Mojo didn’t do too badly as an artist and genre-defining DJ). Oddly, I did interview another Clash-related Tube busker, a compadre of Joe Strummer’s named Tymon Dogg. A busker I met too late for inclusion in the book, the Boston-based blues and Appalachian fiddler and singer Ilana Katz Katz (sic), has fashioned an entire industry around busking. She plays Boston streets and subways. Her look is distinctive – homemade tie dyes, which she sells alongside CDs. She even bakes muffins which she gives away, hopefully enticing passers-by to leave donations. She has very much her own brand. She plays clubs and festivals, too, but genuinely feels most at home on the streets. PB: What do you think is the fairest way for governments to approach busking and street performance? CB: While researching the book I realised that cities and towns are much livelier and more fun when there’s live music on the streets. At a time in which you can order anything from Amazon without paying for parking and not paying bus fare, what is going to keep brick and mortar stores in business? Busking on the sidewalks or in the town square is one way. New Orleans realized that – their heritage goes back to Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and a particular type of street Dixieland band called “spasm bands” which I define in the book. The same in Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville and Memphis. City governments are coming around. I did interview a few activists – an attorney in New Orleans, and one or two who were around during April 1961 in New York’s Washington Square. You see them at farmer’s markets also. But that said, I recently saw a guitarist at a farmer’s market in the California desert, where I live nowadays, playing very mannered smooth jazz to a backing track that included pre-recorded bass and drums. No spontaneity, no soul. I decided to exclude that from my definition of busking. PB: Thank you.

Band Links:-

https://www.carybaker.com/
https://www.instagram.com/_caryroo_
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Bak

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