CHICAGO — Mark Guarino is a child of Oak Park, Illinois, and has been a writer since high school, his work appearing in a vast and varied number of publications, on stages of theaters in plays he created and now, finally, between covers in a spectacular book dedicated to the musicians of Chicago.
He loves the sounds of this city and has spent the last decade researching, interviewing and writing about the people who make music, promote music, own places where music is played, and those who sit and listen.
The book is titled “Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival” (University of Chicago Press). The handsome jacket illustration is by Jon Langford and the snappy foreword by Robbie Fulks, both of them from other places (Wales and Pennsylvania, respectively) but both popular and influential on the local music scene that Guarino so artfully captures.
