Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
One of my favorite ways to discover a local artist is to study the liner notes of a thrift-store LP. I always grab albums by local folk legend Bob Gibson when they turn up at the nearby Salvation Army. His 1980 record The Perfect High, recorded live at Charlotte’s Web in Rockford and the Earl of Old Town in Chicago, cost me $1.99. More than half its tunes are Shel Silverstein collaborations, and another was cowritten by Tom Paxton (of “The Last Thing on My Mind” fame).
Another song, the aching lament “Leaving for the Last Time,” was cowritten by the underappreciated Jo Mapes (listed as Jo Nates on the sleeve but correctly on the hub label). The song doesn’t appear on any Mapes album, which is notable, but what really struck me about it was the gorgeous singing of Anne Hills—her high, angelic voice is as delicate and strong as a silk thread.
Anne Hills
Fri 4/24, 7 PM, Wesley’s Place, 100 W. Cossitt, La Grange, $20, 18 and under $5, ten and under free, all ages
I’d soon learn that Hills had further connections to Gibson, Paxton, and other folk legends from the Windy City and beyond. Hills spoke to me in February, while she was driving from her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Proctors theater in Schenectady, New York, for a screening of You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine. After the movie, Hills took the stage to discuss the Chicago folk scene of the 1970s—she lived here from the mid-70s till the mid-80s, becoming a pivotal voice and forming musical friendships that have lasted a lifetime.
Anne Hills was born October 18, 1953, in Moradabad, India, to Methodist missionaries from Michigan (where her older sister, Mary, had been born). Her parents taught at a British boys’ school, and after the family returned to Michigan, her dad went back to school to become a doctor and continued visiting India on his own.
Hills sang in church in the twin cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, Michigan, and at age 12 she landed a small role in a local production of Oliver! She won a scholarship to the National Music Camp in Grand Traverse County, Michigan, which in 1962 had opened the Interlochen Arts Academy (now the Interlochen Center for the Arts). Hills attended the academy through her high school years.
“Because I studied voice, they wanted me to do opera and stuff,” she says. “The teachers were always frustrated with me, because I heard Tom Paxton’s song ‘Jimmy Newman,’ about the Vietnam war, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ It’s a point-of-view song that exposes people to somebody else’s life, and it changes the way they feel about something,”
“Folk music, at its very best, is storytelling that lifts people up a little bit from their situation, to see the world from a higher point of view, to take in other people’s experiences.”
The emotional potential of songwriting mattered more to Hills than developing the rarefied techniques of opera. “Folk music, at its very best, is storytelling that lifts people up a little bit from their situation, to see the world from a higher point of view, to take in other people’s experiences,” she says.
Hills studied guitar and started her own folk group, modeled on the trio format of Peter, Paul and Mary. The two male singers were Jerrold Pope (who’d sung with Hills in Interlochen’s “studio orchestra,” as it called its jazz band) and Lawrence Probes. They toured the midwest but shortly went their separate ways. (Pope, who passed away in 2017, later became a professor of voice at Boston University.)
Anne Hills sang in a trio with Lawrence Probes and Jerrold Pope while at Interlochen.
The studio orchestra at Interlochen also included bassist Chris Brubeck (son of Dave “Take Five” Brubeck), pianist James Cathcart (later a voice actor for English-language Pokémon productions), and drummer Peter Erskine (who went on to perform with fusion heavies such as Weather Report and John Abercrombie).
Hills loved a great melody, and she remembers performing songs by Roberta Flack and Laura Nyro. “I was working with people who were really classy,” she says. “I don’t know what I was doing there.”
After high school, Hills went to Michigan State in East Lansing. It was a last-minute decision, because she hadn’t applied anywhere in advance, and it didn’t turn out well. “It was an agricultural school, but they never asked me to sing with the jazz band. I sunk into a really deep depression because I just wasn’t singing,” she says. “I found a piano player to work with a little bit. Finally I dropped out, and I moved to LA.”
Arriving in Los Angeles in the early 70s, Hills stayed with an Interlochen friend, Fred Frees, son of voice actor Paul Frees (who played Boris Badenov, among many others, on The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends). Soon she and Fred moved to San Francisco, where they rented a house owned by guitarist Leo Kottke. Hills took poetry-writing classes, and throughout her stint in California, she occasionally traveled back to Michigan to work on musical theater productions.
Hills initially returned to Michigan because (as she remembers it) she’d fallen in love with someone on one of those productions. That didn’t last, but she soon met her future husband Jan Burda, who’d been active in the Toronto folk scene while in Canada fleeing the draft. He’d cofounded the Toronto Folklore Centre and worked with the Mariposa Folk Festival.
At the time, Burda was living in South Bend, Indiana, repairing instruments at Sunflower Music and living above the shop. They hit it off, beginning a romantic and musical relationship. Hills played a gig in St. Joseph opening for National Recovery Act, an old-timey duo that consisted of fiddler Dave Prine (John’s older brother) and banjoist and guitarist Tyler Wilson. Both musicians were impressed, and Hills says they told her, “You have got to move to Chicago with that voice!”
Hills moved to Chicago in 1976, living in the Old Town location of the Eleanor Club, a group of housing facilities for women. “Two meals a day, curfew at 11, and it was kitty-corner and one street over to Wells, where Earl of Old Town was,” she says. Hills was thrilled to catch a ton of touring artists at the Earl—in our interview, she specifically mentioned Greenwich Village folk pillar Jack Hardy. Meanwhile, Burda sent her tapes of songs they could work on together.
Soon Burda and Hills got tired of riding the South Shore Line to see each other, and Burda joined her in Chicago. They moved to Rogers Park, and in 1978 they married. That same year, they worked with Wilson and his wife, Joan, to open a store in Evanston called Hogeye Music.
Hogeye was (and still is) on Central Street, across from a bookstore owned by Joan’s parents. Initially the shop sold instruments and offered lessons, and soon it began to host folk concerts by the likes of Ed Holstein, Sally Rogers, Claudia Schmidt, and Fleming Brown. The Hogeye crew bought chairs for their audience for 75 cents apiece from St. Athanasius School.
In the early 80s, Hogeye launched an independent record label of the same name. In 1982, Hogeye Records released Hills and Burda’s first duo LP, The Panic Is On, most of which consists of traditional American songs.
Hills had been more comfortable with contemporary artists—Joan Baez, Dan Fogelberg, Joni Mitchell—but when Burda introduced her to the trad repertoire, she fell in love with it. “I was a convert to the power of traditional music,” she says. “I became converted to somebody who really believes in the power of storytelling—and the storytelling gets changed as necessary to be useful to the working people.”
The label’s catalog grew to include albums by Tom Paxton (1983’s Bulletin . . . We Interrupt This Record) and Bob Gibson (1984’s Uptown Saturday Night). Gibson loved the act Burda and Hills had together, and even before the Hogeye imprint existed, he’d invited Hills to sing with him onstage and add backup vocals to a Paxton LP he was producing, 1979’s Up & Up. Hills met Cindy Mangsen (of unrecorded band Ravenswood) at those sessions, and they became lifelong musical partners.
Gibson and Paxton shared a manager, Craig Hankenson, who wanted them to choose a female vocalist to form a trio. They picked Hills, and in 1984 the trio became known as Best of Friends. They toured widely in the U.S., UK, and Canada, but they never made a studio album. Mercifully, WFMT broadcast their February 1985 concert at Holstein’s in Chicago, and the recording the station made was released by Pennsylvania label Appleseed in 2004. Best of Friends are in fine form, with songwriter Michael Smith, another local hero, as guest bassist. They opened with a Shel Silverstein cover and played tunes by every member of the trio. (During this period, Hills also performed with Gibson for his musical The Courtship of Carl Sandburg, with songs based on the poet’s love letters.)
Best of Friends recorded this performance at Holstein’s in Chicago in 1985.
Hills would work with Smith (of “The Dutchman” fame) for many years—playing his songs, producing his albums, forming groups with him. Her debut solo album, the 1985 Hogeye release Don’t Explain, included her first recordings of Smith’s material. “He gives you a real sense of time and place,” she told Mark Guarino in a Reader obituary for Smith. “He puts you right in the center of a scene so you can experience it with him.”
In the late 80s, Hogeye Records was absorbed into the larger Flying Fish label, founded by Bruce Kaplan, former president of the University of Chicago’s Folklore Society. At around this time, Hills left Chicago. She and Burda had already been divorced for a few years (amicably enough to keep running Hogeye together in the interim), and she’d met her future husband, Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine. She moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and they married in 1987.
Hogeye, now at 1920 Central, has been run by Jim Craig since 1991. A former guitar teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music and an enthusiastic participant in the Chicago folk boom of the 1960s, Craig had been a longtime employee of the shop.
Flying Fish released most of Hills’s albums in the 80s and 90s. They included 1988’s Woman of a Calm Heart (coproduced by Artie Traum of the Woodstock Mountains Revue), 1993’s October Child (a collection of Smith’s songs with old friend Erskine on drums), and a pair of records billed to Hills and Mangsen, 1994’s Never Grow Old and 1998’s Never Grow Up. The two Mangsen releases also feature folk elders such as Paxton, Dave Prine, Rosalie Sorrels, and Dave Van Ronk.
Hills worked with Smith again for the 1999 Redwing Music release Paradise Lost & Found. The two of them also formed the group Fourtold with Mangsen and her husband, Steve Gillette; they released a self-titled album on Appleseed Recordings in 2003. Appleseed also released Hills’s 2001 Paxton collaboration Under American Skies. Smith died in 2020, and Hills’s most recent album, 2025’s Every Town, is another collection of his songs, again with Erskine on drums.
These days, Hills tells me, she’s writing songs to protest the cruelty of ICE and its detention camps. And she says she still misses the Chicago folk scene of yore. “It was a heady time for musicians,” she says. “You could really go to a club practically every night of the week—you could jump around to different open mikes to learn how to sing. And then if you wanted to hear performers, you could hear nationally known performers almost every night.”
Hills will return to Chicagoland to play Wesley’s Place in La Grange on Friday, April 24. I’ll be front and center for this angel-voiced living legend, who carries so much of Chicago’s rich folk history in her head and heart.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.