Recorded live at the No Exit Café, Chicago in 1978

As Time Goes By

Pretty Boy Floyd

ShadyGrove

Recorded Live at the Winfield Folk Festival, Winfield Kansas.  Available through Folk Legacy Records.

Chivalrous Shark

Cement Mason Story

Cottage Cheese Story

Guabi Guabi

An old song that drifted across the pond and ended up riding "saddle sore."

Cowboy's Barbara Allen

Interview of Joe Moore, proprietor of the Green Dragon Inn on Blackhawk Island near Fort Atkinson, WI and original owner of the No Exit Café in both Evanston, IL in the 1960's and the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago in the early 1970's.  Recorded and conducted by Dan Keding.  circa 1977.

JoeMoore 1977

PAUL DURST•• tapes made by Art Thieme on December 8th, 1961 atPete
Leibundguth’s  Fret Shop—1500  East  57th Street – Chicago, Illinois

Paul Durst is a hobo fiddler, singer, member of the I.W.W.union --the lndustrial Workers of the World ••the Wobblys. At the time of this recording Paul Durst was 93 yrs old. He had been born in 1868..  His parents had migrated to Wisconsin from Switzerland in 1848 because it reminded them of Switzerland.  During his long life Paul had been migratory crop worker, a union organizer, a member of the- original Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show  (He told me they had introduced hoof•and-mouth disease to Europe/Germany and all Bill's cattle were killed off when found to be infected.. On returning to the USA, Bill was broke & had to be refinanced by his old friend. P,T. Barnum.)  Paul was also a lumberjack. & factory worker, a railroad worker and a raftsman on the Mississippi River. Paul said he was asleep under the boardwalk in
Chicago when the bomb went off at the Haymarket Riot. He had known Joe Hill and had gone with Joe on a tramp steamer to the Hawaiian Islands.  He also said he had been
present at  the Ludlow  Massacre  in Colorado during that terrible strike.-Shortly after I made  these  tapes of Paul,  he had a stroke, recovered pretty much fully, and then hit the road thinking he was becoming too much of a burden on Pete Leibundguth—whose back room at the music shop he had been living in.  Paul then moved in with an old girlfriend-----After that I lost track of him-----but a year or two later my attention was belatedly drawn to an article in the Chicago Sun Times about a very old man with a long flowing beard who had been living in a grotto on the lower level of Wacker Drive under the Michigan Avenue Bridge in Chicago.  The man had been found frozen to death after an extremely cold winter night.  All he had with him was an old beat-up fiddle.
     Most of Paul’s songs were hobo songs and I.W.W. union songs.  His classic version of “The Wabash Cannonball” (not on this tape) was dictated to me during another sitting when I hadn’t lugged by 50 pound Webcor two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder on the Illinois Central out to the Hyde Park section of Chicago.  I also got “The Hobo’s Prayer” from Paul in this same manner.  That prayer is mentioned on this tape but not recited.
     When these tapes deteriorated, I dubbed what I could save onto another reel and then onto a cassette tape.  Fritz Schuler of Manitowoc, Wisconsin digitized the saved material from the later reel I had made and then he created these CDs.

Art T1hieme Peru, Illinois May 10, 2000


PaulDurstInterview ArtThieme 19611208

"Among the Midwest's most popular and enduring folk performers." - Boston Globe

He was assistant manager of the Old Town Folklore Center in Chicago - 1964-1965 & 1966 (retail outlet for the Old Town School of Folk Music), ran The Folk Art Shop in Depoe Bay, Oregon with his wife Carol in 1967 and 1968, sang all over the country for many years -including 37 years singing at the No Exit Cafe & Gallery in Chicago. He played in schools in the 6 counties in and around Chicago through the Urban Gateways arts & education agency for 22 years, was a host of National Public Radio's "Flea Market" radio show broadcast live from the Old Town School of Folk Music every Sunday afternoon in the mid-1980s, sang and told tales for about a decade on the steamboat Julia Belle Swain and the diesel boat Twilight on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. A photographer pre 1960 through part of the 2000s (decade), Art has made his photos available to the public on the Mudcat internet site.

athieme

Popular tracks