Sweet Home Chicago! (My Hometown)

It's stuff like this that brings you back to your roots. It brought back memories of visiting my Grand Parents in Chicago. Trips to the Amphitheater once a year for the International Car Show. The big Sears store and "Monkey-Ward". Zales, White Castle, all the "Old Style" tavern signs, the Field Museum and Museum of Science and Industry. Big buildings lots of people and traffic. 

Several kinds of "streetcars" and buses and the "L" train through the city. And my weekend train trips from Great Lakes Naval Station through the Northwest train station then a walk through downtown to the LaSalle Street Station for my train to New Lenox.

Probably most of that stuff is gone. It's kind of sad, it's "progress" - I know, but it's still sad that the things that make something unique and stick in your memory are the first things that disappear. But the music lives on forever.

This is what happens when you put the 5 best guitar players in the world together in the same room (Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Robert Cray, Hubert Sumlin). They fight over who plays lead guitar in  - "Sweet Home Chicago"  Buddy Guy stole this show, Eric was just another guitar player. HA! can you even imagine Eric - just another guitar player?

 

"Sweet Home Chicago" is a popular blues standard in the twelve bar form. It was first recorded and is credited to have been written by Robert Johnson. Over the years the song has become one of the most popular anthems for the city of Chicago despite ambiguity in Johnson's original lyrics.

 

Look who came to this party of "Who's Who" of the Blues ...

 

Buddy Guy gets President Obama to sing a verse of Sweet Home Chicago! ... I think "New Orleans" just dropped off into the gulf of Mexico. 

 

Finale Performance of "Sweet Home Chicago" featuring Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, members of Earth, Wind & Fire, Lovin' Spoonful, Robbie Robertson and Melissa Etheridge at the 2000 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. 

 

Check out some of the "meanings" of the lyrics - Sweet Home Chicago. 

 

BTW - If Sweet Home Chicago doesn't ROCK you...You're OFF you're rocker!