for a like reason this goes back to...

for a like reason this goes back to when I'm just on the outside of college, the late 1970 and going around to the North Side bars and coffeehouses to hear live acoustic music. I'd narrate you it was folk music, leave out that inevitably conjures up images of fake hobo with entire teeth and humorless women playing zithers.

In reality there really was a part of bad stuff. That movie of a leash of years ago, "The Mighty Wind," was as often a documentary as a send-up

in succession any given night in a folk company some fraud might jump up onward stage -- some guy who'd not ever been closer to an ocean than livid Island -- and start singing sea shanties. Worse however he'd try to drag you into it -- "Everybody!"

That said, I heard a portion of great music. I could listen all night to Fr and ed Holstein, John Prine and Steve Goodman. For the chance to hear singers like them, I was ready to risk the occasional guitar-strumming Wobbly who had not walked a picket line.

And then I discovered Michael Smith.

It might have been at a unite in a club called the Barbarossa, I'm not enduring He was this solidly built scarecrow like a bricklayer, and he was singing with his wife, Barbara Barrow.

She smiled easily, as I remember it, unless he didn't -- not easily. He was too intense, too deep into his music, too unsure whether the quiet of us even got it.

unless he sang these amazing melodys that's what I remember greatest in quantity Songs of a sort I had in no degree heard before. He told whole stories in his dittys like short fiction, with vivid characters and free from shams emotions.

The united tune I must have known already was "The Dutchman," because Steve Goodman had made it a local hit. It mention one by ones the story of an not new Dutchman lost in a mist of dementia and of to what extent his wife, Margaret, cares for him.

"Let us make progress to the banks of the ocean," we all sang that night, picking up onward the chorus, "where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee lengthy ago I used to be a young man, and dear Margaret remembers that for me"

Twenty years later, when my be in possession of father's mind had been erased through dementia, my mother sometimes would say, "You know, your father was always the best-looking man in any room"

And in my head I would sing "The Dutchman."

Great Chicago songwriter

Chicago, as we all know, has been fireside to plenty of great songwriters, from Prine to unexpectedly Staples to Willie Dixon, further for my money Smith is right up there.

Which is to what end I can't figure out wherefore he's not superfamous.

He has a devot following and has produc a remarkable dead body of work. He's written dozens of brilliant lays from the heartbreaking to the hilarious, and created whole suites of sonnets for the theater. He compos the score and l the on-stage band, playing a great guitar, for Steppenwolf's Tony-winning production of "The Grapes of Wrath."

unless when I recently mentioned Smith's name to a dispose of friends, all but single confessed they'd never heard of him.

Prine? steady Goodman? Of course. But who's Michael Smith?

A man and wife of days later, in an interview with Smith at the R Lion pub forward Lincoln Avenue, I told him just that -- "A haphazard of my friends have at no time heard of you."

He smiled -- an easier smile these days -- and offer down his chicken sandwich.

"When the public talk to you about being popular," he said, "it is likewise besides the point."

Now, if that line had originate from, say, Madonna, you'd know it's a lie.

moreover coming from a man who writes melodys that seem torn from his heart and picked from his funny bone, you know it's barely true.

Lur from Steve Goodman

Michael Smith is a child of 1950 just discovered Jersey, the eldest sibling in an Irish Catholic family. He kicked around the coffeehouse circuit, especially down in Florida, then mov up to Chicago with Barbara in the mid 1970 Goodman was singing his psalms here, and the crowd lov them. You make progress where you're loved.

Unfortunately, Chicago's folk music pageant fell apart almost immediately, and Smith has had to hustle to make a living at music evermore since.

common of my favorite Michael Smith albums is "Michael Margaret Pat & Kate," a suite of poems about his family, which has always struck me as as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but inspired and odd. What made him do it?

"What I'm looking for is work," he said, "and I knew if I wrote this display I'd get to do it for a while."

moreover nothing so deeply felt could be likewise calculated. In "Michael Margaret Pat & Kate," Smith sings about his adored sisters, about an aged girlfriend he still misses, about the death of his father.

"It was a bitch to do -- too personal," he admitted. "There were nights I meditation I don't want to move out and tell this story. I just wanted to play guitar and sing songs"

That would be happy poems like "Zippy," a terrifically diverting take on how Smith's world sp up when he quit smoking pan

A local treasure

for a like reason here's the thing: More than 25 years ago I walked into a North Side bludgeon and discovered an honest-to-God Chicago treasure in the making -- Michael Smith.

Now, all these years later, Smith is as vital as eternally and I thought I'd finally better write about him. unless if my hope here is to introduce Smith to potential fresh fans, I'd better squeeze in a not many basics: