{"id":402065,"date":"2025-11-24T20:40:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T20:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/402065\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T20:40:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T20:40:11","slug":"maybe-things-will-be-better-in-chicago-chicago-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/402065\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe Things Will Be Better in Chicago \u2013 Chicago Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the opening track of her gorgeous new album, Sad and Beautiful World<\/a>, Mavis Staples raises her voice in a chorus that could serve as an anthem for this city: \u201cMaybe things will be better in Chicago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simply titled \u201cChicago,\u201d the song was originally recorded by Tom Waits<\/a>. Like much of his music, it was rollicking if a bit abrasive and weird. But even amid all of the clattering noise, you could hear a real gem of a song, with lyrics<\/a> reflecting on Chicago\u2019s long history as a magnet for people seeking a better life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe seeds are planted here, but they won\u2019t grow \/ We won\u2019t have to say goodbye if we all go \/ Maybe things will be better in Chicago\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

When Waits released the track on his 2011 record Bad as Me, he said the album\u2019s songs included \u201cmusic for immigrants.\u201d This particular song could be about immigrants coming to Chicago from just about anywhere \u2014 some place where seeds won\u2019t grow, either literally or metaphorically. But more than anything else, this bluesy number feels like a story about the millions of African Americans who fled from the South and its cruel Jim Crow laws in the 20th century. They made their way north to cities including Chicago, which they saw as a sort of promised land.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo leave all we\u2019ve ever known for a place we\u2019ve never seen \/ Maybe things will be better in Chicago \/ Well, it\u2019s brave for us to stay, even braver to go away \/ Wherever they go, I go \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Now comes an uplifting version by the beloved Mavis Staples, a vibrant 86-year-old who knows more than a few things about Chicago and the Great Migration. She was born in Chicago in 1939, three years after her father, Roebuck \u201cPops\u201d Staples, had joined the exodus north from Mississippi, arriving in Chicago with a thin jacket in the midst of winter. \u201cRoebuck was never going back to the cotton fields if he could help it, no matter how out of place he felt in this cold, dirty city,\u201d Greg Kot wrote in his 2014 book I\u2019ll Take You There<\/a>: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom\u2019s Highway.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As all those migrants learned, Chicago wasn\u2019t really a paradise. But for the Staples family and countless others, life was better here. When Pops and his children formed the Staple Singers gospel group, Chicago was their home base. They became pop stars as well as civil rights champions. In 1965, Mavis took the lead vocals on \u201cFreedom Highway,\u201d<\/a> a song written by her father, boldly declaiming: \u201cMarch for freedom\u2019s highway \/ March each and every day \/ Made up my mind and I won\u2019t turn around.\u201d<\/p>\n

A similar spirit animates her lively new rendition of \u201cChicago.\u201d<\/a> The Waits recording was already one of my favorite songs about this city, but I recognize that Waits, with his gravelly voice and his often-dense arrangements, isn\u2019t everyone\u2019s cup of tea. Now, thanks to Staples, we have two terrific versions of this \u201cChicago.\u201d She has put her own personal stamp on it, making a more accessible recording with an infectious groove.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we need, the Lord will give us \/ All we want, we carry with us \/ You know where I can be found \/ Where the rainbow hits the ground \/ I\u2019m not alone, I\u2019m not afraid, not alone, not afraid \/ \u2019Cause this bird, little bird, this bird left its cage\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first song about the city\u2019s role in the Great Migration. That theme can also be detected in two of the most iconic Chicago songs, although it\u2019s somewhat hidden.<\/p>\n

Originally recorded in 1936 by blues pioneer Robert Johnson, \u201cSweet Home Chicago\u201d can be interpreted as an \u201cinvitation for Blacks to flee the Jim Crow South for opportunity elsewhere,\u201d Chicago\u2019s Edward McClelland wrote<\/a>. Johnson\u2019s song was a rewrite of an older blues tune about going to Kokomo<\/a>, Indiana \u2014 Johnson replaced \u201cKokomo\u201d with \u201cChicago,\u201d while adding a geographically puzzling reference to \u201cthe land of California.\u201d The Blues Brothers and most other singers have left out the part about California when they covered \u201cSweet Home Chicago.\u201d The Great Migration may indeed be the song\u2019s subtext, although Johnson\u2019s words<\/a> don\u2019t make that exactly clear. Why is the narrator asking his \u201cbaby\u201d to go to Chicago? As in many blues songs, the backstory is rather nebulous.<\/p>\n

Another ubiquitous song, \u201cChicago (That Toddling Town),\u201d celebrates the city as a place where people have fun \u2014 doing things like toddling<\/a>, an infantile style of dancing that was a craze in the 1920s<\/a> \u2014 even when moral scolds like the evangelist Billy Sunday try to shut the town down. When Frank Sinatra recorded the most popular version<\/a> in 1957, he didn\u2019t sing all the verses of Fred Fisher\u2019s 1922 song<\/a>. Some of the lyrics omitted by Sinatra describe Chicago\u2019s growing African American population: \u201cMore colored people up in State Street you can see \/ Than you\u2019ll see in Louisiana or Tennessee.\u201d The Great Migration was originally a subtext in this song, too, even if that part gets skipped over by Sinatra and just about every other singer.<\/p>\n

You may prefer other songs about Chicago. Perhaps you feel nostalgia for those 1970s hits \u201cThe Night Chicago Died\u201d<\/a> and \u201cLake Shore Drive.\u201d<\/a> Or maybe you\u2019d rather hear Wilco\u2019s \u201cVia Chicago\u201d<\/a> or Sufjan Stevens\u2019s \u201cChicago.\u201d<\/a> One of my personal faves, the Handsome Family\u2019s darkly humorous tale of death and desolation, \u201cThe Woman Downstairs,\u201d<\/a> is far too bleak to ever serve as a tourism jingle. There are so many songs about this city \u2014\u00a0Wikipedia has a list of around 700<\/a>, including 50 titled \u201cChicago\u201d \u2014 and they cover a huge range of themes. Local tunesmiths wrote quite a few of these songs, but the city has also inspired musicians from all over.<\/p>\n

Although Tom Waits is a Californian, he clearly has an affinity for Chicago. In the mid-1970s, when he performed at least 10 concerts at the Quiet Knight<\/a>, he often stayed in a nearby hotel for transients, at 933 West Belmont Avenue. \u201cThe woman who was the night clerk at the Wilmont Hotel, her son is the Marlboro Man, and that\u2019s how I got into show business,\u201d Waits told WXRT<\/a>, in one of his typically outlandish tales. Waits also spent months in Chicago in 1986, when he starred in Steppenwolf Theatre\u2019s staging of his musical Frank\u2019s Wild Years<\/a> at the Briar Street Theatre. Waits cowrote that play \u2014 and many of his songs \u2014 with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, who has roots in the Chicago area. As Waits accurately crooned in a wistful piano ballad about Brennan, \u201cshe grew up outside McHenry in Johnsburg, Illinois<\/a>.\u201d Waits has sprinkled other Illinois towns into his lyrics, singing about a circus camped in \u201ca pasture outside Kankakee<\/a>,\u201d a soldier who misses \u201cold Rockford town<\/a>,\u201d and a guy in trouble with the law who \u201cleft Waukegan<\/a> at the slamming of the door.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Waits had never devoted an entire song to this city until he released \u201cChicago,\u201d which he wrote with Brennan, as the opening cut on Bad as Me. The track features guitarist Keith Richards, who famously channeled his love for Chicago blues into the sound of the Rolling Stones. A loud horn section propels the track, pulsing and chugging like a locomotive, and Waits shouts, \u201cAll aboard! All aboard!\u201d in the final moments. When this album came out, Pitchfork asked Waits<\/a> how he comes up with his musical arrangements. \u201cSometimes words are just music themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cLike \u2018Chicago\u2019 is a very musical sounding name.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Waits played \u201cChicago\u201d on The Late Show With David Letterman in 2012<\/a>, but he has never actually performed the song in Chicago. Waits hasn\u2019t been here for a concert since 2006<\/a>, and he hasn\u2019t done a full concert anywhere since 2008. Waits, who turns 76 in December, occasionally acts in movies, but his musical career appears to be in hibernation. He hasn\u2019t released an album in the 14 years since Bad as Me.<\/p>\n

\u201cChicago\u201d was finally performed in front of a Chicago crowd in June, when Mavis Staples sang it<\/a> during her headlining concert at the Chicago Blues Festival in Millennium Park. And \u201cChicago\u201d will almost surely be on the set list for her January 10 show at the Chicago Theatre<\/a>. Her rousing studio version was released November 7, featuring riffing by guitarists Derek Trucks and Buddy Guy \u2014 another Black migrant from the South who moved to Chicago.<\/p>\n

While the song feels inspired by the Great Migration, the lyrics are vague enough that they might describe migrants coming to Chicago from any number of places around the world: Irish folks fleeing starvation during the Great Famine of the 1840s, or Venezuelans abandoning their beleaguered country in the 21st century, to cite just two examples. To countless people across nearly two centuries, Chicago has been a beacon of hope.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The song tempers that hope with the word \u201cmaybe\u201d \u2014\u00a0\u201cMaybe things will be better in Chicago.\u201d Migrants setting their eyes on Chicago may wonder if the city will live up to their expectations. Indeed, many people over the years have encountered hard times once they get here. If you\u2019re a Chicagoan listening to this song, it might prompt you to wonder whether Chicago can do a better job of being a welcoming city.<\/p>\n

The song\u2019s final verse touches on the love that many migrants feel for their homelands, in spite of all the troubles they\u2019re trying to get escape:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much magic we have known \/ On this sapphire we call home \/ With my coat and my hat \/ I say goodbye to all of that \/ Maybe things will be better, maybe things will be better, maybe things will be better in Chicago\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing Mavis Staples sing those lines, I feel hope. Maybe things will be better in Chicago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the opening track of her gorgeous new album, Sad and Beautiful World, Mavis Staples raises her voice…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":402066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[190221,960,190223,5386,1818,175176,17834,975,190222,160308],"class_list":{"0":"post-402065","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-bad-as-me","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-great-migration","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-illinois","13":"tag-mavis-staples","14":"tag-migrants","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-sad-and-beautiful-world","17":"tag-tom-waits"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115606613459606767","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}