Blind Arvella Gray and the Demise of Maxwell Street Market

One day around 1970, during my adolescence in the Chicago suburbs, my father suggested that we visit Maxwell Street Market, an open-air flea market adjacent to downtown Chicago. 

He wanted to show me where his parents – Eastern European immigrants – used to take him shopping as a child. He described the area to me as being a generally run-down neighborhood to the west of Chicago’s Loop, and south of University of Illinois Chicago Campus, its southern border along largely Latino Pilsen neighborhood, and its western border leaning up against Little Italy and several major hospitals. Thereupon, in generally unkempt storefronts and, moreover, on card tables in the middle of the streets, are where his parents – a shoemaker and his wife, both of whom having arrived in the Windy City by way of Minsk, Belarus – used to buy clothing for their two sons during the 1930s and ‘40s. In that most of the merchants were Jewish at that time, the neighborhood came to be known as Jewtown – and the later Black settlers of the area kept that appellation alive, not always fondly. 

All around, one could hear merchants hawking their new and used goods through distorted bullhorns. The aroma of Maxwell Street Polish sausages frying up year-around from numerous stands was as pervasive as the cacophony of merchants haggling with customers over the price of a product like Bug Out! insect spray, sold out of the trunk of a car.

I’ll always remember my dad telling me: “You’ll only want to go there once – believe me.”

What had changed since my dad and his brother used to shop on Maxwell Street as kids was the presence of music – music on the streets every Sunday morning. The musicians by now were nearly all Black, and they’d turned to Maxwell as a place to earn rent money after the blues taverns had closed at 4 a.m. – some making a beeline to the area without stopping at home. 

When my dad parked his car at the University of Illinois lot, directly across Roosevelt Road from the Maxwell parcel, the first thing I heard – long before I could see where it was coming from – was the sound of a slide guitar – not just any guitar but a National steel resonator guitar. We followed the music and found ourselves standing on the west side of Halsted Street, midway between Roosevelt and Maxwell, where Blind Arvella Gray was playing the folk/blues song “John Henry.” Sensing that his audience was generally passing by rather than gathering around, the song seemed to have no beginning and no end. He literally played it for his entire shift. He’d even added his own lyrics (“I got the dress off of Maxwell, I got the shoes off of Halsted”) to the traditional refrain (“John Henry was a steel-driving man, lo’d, lo’d!”). 

When he stopped to catch his breath, I introduced myself and asked Mr. Gray for his phone number, which he cheerfully provided. 

Before I could even get around to witnessing the other singers who played the Maxwell district that week – Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis, Little Pat Rushing, Jim Brewer and his wife Fannie, Big John Wrencher, John Henry Davis and the Clarksdale, Miss Blues Band at Maxwell and Sangamon Streets; Porkchop Hines and Arvella Gray’s own sister, Granny Littricebey, to name a few – I knew my life had turned a corner.

Before I forgot, I turned to my dad and said: “We are coming back here, by the way! I want to come here every Sunday!”

One day while walking through Northwestern University’s student union (I was still a high school student, but we lived near the campus), I saw a new newsprint publication called Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly. It was the first edition of the city’s first alternative weekly newspaper. I picked up a copy. And days later, I mailed an unsolicited manuscript – a feature about who else but Blind Arvella Gray. I titled the article Blues Over A Tin Cup, even though his cup for spare change was actually a paper Dixie cup safety-pinned to the lapel of his jacket. The Reader published it as its cover story on January 7, 1972. I was 16 and my life as a writer had begun.

My quest to promote this blind busker did not stop there. One day I was looking in the Chicago north suburban Yellow Pages under “Phonograph Record Manufacturers,” only to find that one label of which I’d never heard – Birch Records – was located in the suburb where my family lived, Wilmette. I cold-called and asked what kind of records they released. Turns out their specialty was old country music releases, artists who’d played on WLS-AM’s vintage Barndance radio broadcast including Patsy Montana and LuLuBelle & Scotty. “Might you be interested in recording a street singer who plays down on Maxwell Street named Arvella Gray?” Turns out the owner, Dave Wylie, had not only heard of Mr. Gray but had seen him perform at a University of Chicago Folk Festival. He readily agreed to record what would prove Gray’s first and only album. A few weeks later, we drove from the north suburb of Wilmette across the length of Chicago to the south suburb of Harvey, Ill. where at Sound Unlimited Studios we recorded an album all through the night. We drove back north as the sun was rising. The ultimate album received favorable notice, and Arvella spent his remaining eight years able to perform indoor ticketed shows at university coffeehouses and festivals. A 2005 reissue of Blind Arvella Gray’s album was reviewed on NPR and in The New York Times and Rolling Stone.

Unfortunately, most singers in Maxwell Street never received anything close to that degree of attention. Most played for spare change year-around, including during Chicago’s legendarily cold winters. When one would cease to find them at their self-assigned spot on the Maxwell grid for weeks on end, it was safe to assume they’d become ill or passed away.

Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music is available for order here.

Bonus: For more insight into Cary’s writing process and his work, check out our interview with him, linked below.