One of the notable encounters in Chicago’s rich musical history took place one night decades ago when Luciano Pavarotti, in town to perform with the Lyric Opera, was convinced to partake of Jim Post’s one-man show called “Galena Rose,” playing in a small theater in town The opera giant was scheduled to see just the first act but was so enthralled that he stayed for the entire show. Backstage afterward, he told Post, “You have the voice of an angel. You should have been an opera singer.”
Jim Post was a folk singer and one of the greatest. He died Sept. 14 in hospice care in a facility in Dubuque, Iowa. The cause was congenital heart failure. He was 82 years old and a memorial service is planned.
“Once again we lose a special part of our past,” said Bonnie Koloc, the folk music legend who remains active and has long lived in Iowa. “Jim was a talented writer and singer, a wonderful performer who always gave totally of himself in any performance. He always went for the high notes. He entertained a lot of people in his lifelong career.”
Jimmie David Post was born in Houston on Oct. 28, 1939. At six he won a broadcast radio competition and was an entertainer ever since.
He arrived in Chicago in the early 1960s and quickly became one of the seminal stars of the booming folk music scene. Its epicenter was the Earl of Old Town, which was, from the early 1960s into the 1980s, arguably the most famous folk music club in the world. There. Post shared the stage with such great if bygone talents as Steve Goodman, John Prine and Fred Holstein, and such very much alive performers as Koloc and Corky Siegel.
“”He is gone, but he left us all mesmerized,” said Siegel. “He had so much intense energy.”
Post fondly recalled those early Chicago days, and nights, once telling me, “I spent most of my youth in Texas singing in Baptist churches. My range of musical knowledge was fairly limited. If it hadn’t been for Fred (Holstein), I never would have known folk music. When I got here, I was so ignorant. I didn’t know Pete Seeger, the Weavers, nothing. But those days were glorious. There were nights the Earl was so packed, you couldn’t even squeeze a sardine in the door.”
Disturbed by the violence that he witnessed during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Post hit the road. He was in New York when he scored his first big hit. With his then wife Cathy Conn as the duo Friend & Lover, they had a national Top 10 single in with the love-and-protest song “Reach Out of the Darkness.”
He was then off to live in Colorado and later San Francisco, playing, composing and making some of the first of the 20 albums that peppered his career.
In the early 1980s, he found his own piece of paradise in Galena, Illinois, moving into a house on a small bluff overlooking the picturesque river town in the state’s surprisingly hilly northwest corner.
“On a clear day,” he said, “I can see hills on the other side of the Mississippi.”
The town comforted and inspired him, giving birth to his one-man show, “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West.” That show was what so beguiled Pavarotti, an ambitious full-blown musical theater piece that enjoyed critical acclaim and had long runs at a number of theaters.
I was one of those raving, and writing, when the show played the Civic Studio Theater in the late 1980s, that it was “an absolute tour de force of song, dance, humor and history,” one that allowed Post to “create a unique and intoxicating world.”
He was always an ebullient and moving singer and songwriter. In addition to performing live and recording, Post also wrote several children’s books in collaboration with another of his four wives, the writer Janet Smith, and created Reading by Ear, a successful music-based reading program for children with developmental difficulties.
He created other one-man shows, such as “Best Damn Songs (Most People Never Heard),” a homage to his fellow folkies Goodman and Stan Rogers, both of whom had died. That gave birth to “An Evening in Old Town.” Reviewing this show in 1993, critic David Duckman wrote that while Post’s “evocative, and sometimes hilarious, stories occasionally reveal his own sense of nostalgia for the good old days, the power and passion of his vocal performances brought the material square into the ‘90s.
“Where another performer might draw groans by opening a show with a medley consisting of ‘There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight,’ ‘’If I Had a Hammer’ and ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ Post made these numbers shine like new by steering clear of dewy-eyed reverence. He so potently belted out the words and melodies that their meanings went straight to the heart.”
He later crafted what became his musical bread and butter and an ongoing delight. “Mark Twain and the Laughing River” was a captivating show that he performed all over the country. Called by the Washington Post a “one-man tour de force, part musical, part drama and thoroughly entertaining,” it benefited tremendously from the fact that as he aged, Post’s bushy white-haired look came to resemble the image that most people have of Twain.
He always came home to Galena and was ever open to its charms and wonders. “Just a couple of days ago I was looking out my first-floor window at a bunch of trees in the distance,” he told me a few years ago. “And all of a sudden this bear walked up and stared in the window at me and I stared back, wondering to myself, ‘What is this bear thinking?’”
In 2016, Jimmy Fallon featured Post, indirectly, on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” In a segment titled “Do Not Play,” a feature meant to highlight music or an artist one should avoid listening to, Fallon played Post’s “I Love My Life” from his 1978 album of the same name. Fallon seemed to like the song, dancing along to the music.
Post didn’t hear about this until a friend called: “He said, ‘Jim you’re on the Jimmy Fallon show,’ and I said, ‘No I’m not, I’m in bed.’ I later heard from so many people. Bother me? I was happy about it and when I finally saw it, Fallon was having so much fun.”
As Post began to experience health troubles, he kept working, talking enthusiastically about a possible new piece based on Twain’s writing.
“The last couple years I spoke to him often,” said Siegel. “He became a mellow dude, a very kind and compassionate dude, and actually a perfectly and joyfully wise dude. He appreciated the gifts that fell from heaven into his lap, and was very ready for the closing remarks.”