‘Adventures in Busking and Street Music’ author Cary Baker live conversation and book signing this Saturday at Desert General

Cary Baker, author of Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking at Street Music, will be in conversation with music journalist Steve Hochman this Saturday (October 11) at 5:30 p.m. at Desert General in Twentynine Palms.

In the intro to his book Down on the Corner, Baker says “busking” entered the English lexicon as what Merriam-Webster defines as ‘a person who entertains in a public place for donation”; its origins from the Italian buscare and the Spanish buscar, meaning “to look for.” 

When Baker discovered busking in 1970, he was a young boy in Chicago, walking down the open-air flea market on Maxwell Street, where he heard a National steel resonator guitar for the first time, played by a blind man named Arvella Gray, a local Chicago legend.

“The first thing we heard upon parking our car across the street was the steel resonator slide guitar sound. He was blind black man of about 60-something, just playing this steel guitar outside, playing a version of the folk Blues song ‘John Henry’ for like 30-minutes, just assuming that people were passing anyway. He just staying with the song, which was his greatest hit. So I tapped him on the shoulder at some point and then introduced myself and found out that his name was Arvella Gray and that people know him as Blind Arvella Gray. He had a tin cup and he was the model busker. I’ve never seen the street singer before and although I knew a little about Blues Led zeppelin and The Rolling Stones but basically from this was as authentic as it had gotten in my experience.” 

Baker chronicles busking’s origins from early folk, country, and blues, to acapella doo-wop, from its outlawed eras to its power in numbers, all the way to minimalist punk rock, from performers like Bob Dylan (by way of Woodie Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot), the Violent Femmes, and Billy Bragg all helping normalize its timeless, street-level appeal. Baker also cites local hi-desert artists Victoria Williams and Tim Easton as important characters in busking’s continuum. I asked Baker what might seem attractive to about the busking experience to a performer.

“Well, it gives people a chance to get out there on their own hours on their own terms. They may not have another way to play some of them haven’t been admitted to the world of clubs or bookings yet.”

And while busking is now a very common sight in public streets, Baker reminds us that by tradition, it carries an element of risk and rebellion, citing the NYC Beatnik Riots in 60s with Greenwich Village street performers on the front lines.

“It was a whole lot more rebellious once upon a time before busking was welcomed. Now busking is saving downtown of just about any town in the USA. You can order anything you want on Amazon these days, but what’s going to make you go to downtown is the possibility of of a live experience, of an interaction, of seeing the members of the human race… Like Greenwich village in New York with the Beatnik Riot, which broke out spontaneously, buskers versus the city. And the city had to ask itself, ‘Are buskers really that bad or are they maybe providing a little bit of life down here?”

Cary Baker’s live conversation and book signing for Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music starts this Saturday (October 11) at 5:30 p.m. at Desert General in Twentynine Palms. Admission is free and open to the public.

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