The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #3491   Message #2556721
Posted By: Art Thieme
03-Feb-09 - 11:04 PM
Thread Name: Origins: City Four Square / No Night There
Subject: RE: Origins: City Four Square
Joe,
I never noticed this thread until now. I was gonna tell you that Horton Barker's singing of this song is simply sublime---one of my all time favorites. Yes, it is on his Folkways LP that Sandy recorded!

Mr. Barker was at the very first University Of Chicago Folk Festival on February 3, 4, and 5, 1961. EVERYONE who heard him then was truly as mesmerized as I. An elderly blind man in a suit up there on stage in venerable Mandel Hall on the U. of C. campus---across the street from Amos Alonzo Stagg Field under which Enrico Fermi first sustained a nuclear reaction. Horton Barker was from Chilhowie, Virginia----a town I went through on a Greyhound bus in 1964. I spontaneously made the driver stop there and let me off so I could try to find him.----Later on that same bus trip I went to the Opry at the old Ryman Auditorium and saw Hank Snow--one of my vocal heroes. Back Stage he told me he was going to the Illinois State Fair next; so I did too--where I saw him again.

Yep, these are fine memories of good musical times, and, Joe, all because you started this thread to find City Four Square all those years ago.

Thanks!

Art