Local favorites Chicago Farmer and Edward David Anderson will again perform together at Martyrs', each bringing their unique brands of folk songwriting to the table. Between Chicago Farmer's breezy, often humored songs and Anderson's serious and personal writing, the show offers a fantastic variety of talent.

 

Read our interviews with Edward David Anderson here and here. 

The new Chicago Farmer album is about Depression, Job Loss, Meth, Skateboards, A Divided Nation, Used Cars, The Late Shift, Farms, Factories, The Destruction of our Environment, and still being around to sing about it.Cody is a folk-singer’s folk-singer and a poet’s poet. He was born and bred in Delavan IL, population 25, surrounded by the endless skies of the American Midwest. Before moving to Chicago in 2003, Cody tried his hand at sessions in Nashville and carefully hewed and tested his art in college town bars and honky-tonks around the Midwest. He now plays regularly in the city and it’s not uncommon to see whole rooms full of strangers erupt and sing along to the choruses of his songs on their first listen (I’ve seen it happen). Cody’s voice is powerful and gritty, emotionally piercing while subtly imbuing additional layers of meaning and poignancy in his lyrical delivery. His song-writing is deeply rooted in the American Folk tradition and all of its grit but with a post Dylan sense of wit, perspicacity and that certain savior-faire. He didn’t go to college but he drank all of their beer.Every folk-singer has to migrate to the city, in a way it seems to be hidden in definition of a folk singer anymore. Cody has come to remind Chicago that it is in Illinois. And to remind the rest of the world that when Louis Armstrong redefined, some say invented the art of Jazz in the 1920′s he brought his Hot Fives to Chicago to do it. When Robert Johnson wanted to put his Mississippi Mud on wax, his hellhound chased him to Chicago to do it. And same like, Cody has come to Chicago to deliver what it needs, when it isn’t even sure itself. He is currently recording a collection of songs from his vast back-catalog and performing across the heartland.Music, by its nature, is a migratory creature. It moves as it moves, often powerfully, through people and places, communities and cultures, created and carried on currents of electricity and air. Edward David Anderson is one of its modern makers, a rock and roll veteran from the cornfields of Illinois, who went into the woods of coastal Alabama and found musical serendipity, emerging with Lower Alabama: The Loxley Sessions—a timeless, unvarnished beauty of an album.