Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Bookseller Created
Set in the Midwest
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Donât miss outâpurchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowWindy City Blues
Narrator
Robin Miles
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weâre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
14 hours 50 minutes
Language
English
In the middle of the twentieth century, the music of the Mississippi Delta arrived in Chicago, drawing the attention of entrepreneurs like the Chess brothers. Their label, Chess Records, helped shape that music into the Chicago Blues, the soundtrack for a transformative era in American history.
But, for Leeba Groski, Chess Records was just where she worked âŠ
Leeba doesnât exactly fit in, but her passion for music and her talented piano playing captures the attention of her neighbor, Leonard Chess, who offers her a job at his new record company. What begins as answering phones and filing becomes much more as Leeba comes into her own as a songwriter and befriends performers like Muddy Waters, Howlinâ Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Etta James. But she also finds love with a black blues guitarist named Red Dupree.
With their relationship unwelcome in segregated Chicago and shunned by Leebaâs Orthodox Jewish family, Leeba and Red soon find themselves in the middle of the civil rights movement, and they discover that, in times of struggle, music can bring people together.
Renée Rosen is the author of Dollface and the young adult novel Every Crooked Pot. She lives in Chicago, where she is at work on a new novel.
Robin Miles began her audiobook narration in 1994. She's read over 130 titles covering many different genres and has won multiple Earphones awards. Her many audiobook credits include Augusten Burroughs's Sellevision, Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying, and Lalita Tademy's Cane River. Her film and television credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographicâs Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors' unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a B.A. in Theater Studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.
Featured in these playlists...
Reviews
âThe awardâwinning voice actor Robin Miles has a wonderful affinity for accents and character voices. This intimate look at the rise of Chicagoâs electric blues and the Chess Record label in the late 1940s and â50s gives her a perfect stage. Miles produces a myriad of character voicesâfrom legendary bluesman Muddy Watersâ Mississippi growl to harmonica player Little Walterâs insistent tone to Leonard Chessâ Yiddish intonations. Miles also finds the easy warmth and pulsating sense of discovery that sweeps the interracial couple Leeba Groski and Red Dupree from the first chords of a love song to the front lines of the civil-rights movement. This is a big-hearted story that can only be told with the rhythm of the blues. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.â
âThe rise of the Chicago Blues scene fairly shimmers with verve and intensity, and the large, diverse cast of characters is indelibly portrayed with the perfect pitch of a true artist.â
âRosen skillfully weaves fact and fiction into her story of challenges, triumphs, music, and political change. A not-to-be-missed novel that hits all the right notes.â
âAn up-tempo song of love, music, and the civil rights movement.â
âRiveting reading, often heartbreaking, with moments of pure elation.â
âWith her compelling characters living right up front and center during the onset of the civil rights movement, Rosen has them help usher in revolutionary new chapters in both musical and social history.â
âBursting with the vitality of the new blues scene in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s.â
âRosen captures the birth of Chicago blues from its shabby inception to its raucous successâŠI was engrossed.â
Expand reviews