Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician and Squatter

by Westley Heine, Michele McDannold (Editor)

At the height of the late 2000’s recession, a singer-songwriter throws himself at the mercy of the streets. A panorama of pedestrians, workers, graffiti artists, bike messengers, homeless, hipsters, hustlers, punks, drunks, poets, grifters, and gangsters—Busking Blues is about giving up everything for the muse.

Down and out, but on top of the world, Heine gives a devil-may-care serenade through the underground of bad relationships, dead-end jobs, blues jams, for-profit colleges, hospitals, dive bars, all night diners, subway tunnels, back alleys, blood banks, and one ancient YMCA. This streetwise tale based on real life is in turns sympathetic, adventurous, gritty, and oddly uplifting.

Busking Blues is a slice of time in an ever-changing city. Though, some things are constant. In a place where flesh and souls are for sale, Heine sees the cosmic beauty haloed in the streetlights. At the frontlines of America, this is a meditation on karma, superstition, classism, race and inequality, heartbreak, disillusionment, and freedom. He waxes philosophically from the highs of freedom to the lows of the gutter, while pounding the pavement until it cracks.

274 pages, Paperback

Published September 8, 2022

Reviews

[Randy Rhody]

I like the cover illustration (Hey Roadside Press, where's the cover for Goodreads?). I was hoping to like the book. I really was. The writing is competent, though carelessly edited, but for a story self-described as gritty, Blues is painfully tame. Never exposed to the world’s injustices, our narrator isn’t thrown beyond his comfort zone, let alone the reader’s. On page 172 he addresses that very topic.

When writing what would be considered gritty realism it is important to remember that even gritty realism is as subjective as anything else….

…the stark truth of the street that few are brave enough to acknowledge, but when someone does it rings true

Stark Millennial truths such as, “With a phone in my pocket I’m back on the grid.”

My recommendation for gritty: Down and Out in Paris and London.

[Jen]

It's about time you joined a kindly-yet-cagey blues musician on a swashbuckling adventure through twenty-first century Chicago. Learn, or remember, what it's like to be both broke and optimistic. Feel your face hit the pavement? Fist? Reality of life after acquiring an arts degree? Whether you know it or not, you need this book.