STEVE GOODMAN -- GOOD MORNIN' AMERICA
CHICAGO — 1970s — Folk was ancient history and rock pulsed with sound and light. Unless you were James Taylor, the concert stage was too big for you and your guitar. Then a short, big-eyed kid from the North Side began tuning up.
Steve Goodman played lightning guitar licks. His reedy voice soared. Swept up in heartfelt rhythms, he shook his head, bounced and bobbed, lifting audiences with sheer spirit and song. Though his records sold just enough to earn him a living, no one who saw him ever forgot his pure joy.
“Every audience was his,” Kris Kristofferson remembered. At 5’2”, Goodman looked like a little boy behind that guitar, inside that cowboy hat. But like a boy’s, his energy overwhelmed a room. Longtime fans loved him, people numb to opening acts became converts, yet no one knew his secret.
He was just 20, just starting to play Chicago bars, when chronic fatigue sent him to a doctor. The diagnosis — leukemia — could have been a death sentence, but Goodman kept living, “seemingly by willpower alone,” his wife Nancy recalled. “Steve wanted to live as normal a life as possible, only he had to live it as fast as he could.”
This is where violins might enter, but Goodman wanted no sympathy. Twice a month, without any publicity, he visited Sloan Kettering in New York. Between chemotherapy sessions, he set out to charm everyone.
“Some people you really have to work at getting to know who they are,” Arlo Guthrie said. “You didn’t have to do that with Steve Goodman. You knew who Steve Goodman was just by lookin’ at him. For somebody who was sick, he had an awful lot of life in him.”
It was Guthrie who gave Goodman his breakthrough. Approached after a gig, Guthrie wearily agreed to listen to the unknown kid for as long as one beer lasted. As Woody’s son, Arlo had heard some train songs, all right, but few with the poetry of Goodman’s.
All along the southbound odyssey,
Train pulls out of Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields
Passing trains that have no name
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles. . .
Guthrie’s lilting version made “City of New Orleans” a hit. Its joyful chorus — “Good Mornin’ America, how are ya’”— rippled through the culture. “City of New Orleans” was recorded again and again. Goodman never wrote another song like it, but Guthrie, he said, “saved my ass.”
Goodman’s friendship with John Prine also widened his audience. When first hearing Goodman on the radio, Prine said, “I knew I was listening to a tall, lanky guy singing the best train song I ever heard. Then I met Steve Goodman and I was talking to a short Jewish kid singing the best train song I ever heard. The Lord works in strange ways.”
Prine and Goodman toured together, co-writing songs. One, a drippy send-up of country music, contained “every single ingredient of a country song. Except. . .” Watch Goodman jam-pack country cliches into a final verse:
Though his albums could not capture his charisma, Goodman became a fixture at festivals and clubs. Defying his disease, he had three daughters and a devoted following, especially in his hometown.
“Steve was just an irrepressible impish jukebox of songs and energy.”
Chicago appears in several Goodman songs. “Lincoln Park Pirates” turns a sea shanty into a eulogy for a towing company. “Daley’s Gone” memorializes the late mayor. But it was Goodman’s love of the Cubs that still resonates.
In 1981, Goodman recorded “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” He dreamt of singing the song in Wrigley Field but the Cubbies resented being called “the doormat of the National League,” so Goodman wrote “Go, Cubs, Go!” By the summer of 1984, when the hapless Cubs were finally winning, the song was heard throughout Chicago. Goodman, however, was facing the end.
White blood cells in his spine forced a bone marrow transplant. It didn’t stop the onslaught. Come September, with the Cubs in first, Goodman was booked to sing the national anthem at Wrigley, IF the Cubs made the playoffs. Cheerful to the last, he called himself “Cool Hand Leuk.” Left bald by chemo, he titled an album “Artistic Hair.” These were the only clues, leaving fans stunned by the obit.
Five days later, the Cubs won their division. Jimmy Buffett’s national anthem at Wrigley, dedicated to Goodman, might have ended the show, but there was an encore.
In 1982, Goodman had started his own record company, with his wife and daughters packaging albums at the kitchen table. Seems fans had been taping his concerts. Goodman’s manager confiscated many tapes and from them Red Pajama Records began releasing posthumous live albums, eight so far. A biography, Steve Goodman: Facing the Music, came out in 2007, the year after his daughter, Rosanna, compiled a tribute album, “My Old Man.” And then the Cubs.
Bleacher bums made “Go, Cubs, Go” their anthem. In 2016, when the Cubs won their first World Series in more than a century, the song reached number three on Billboard charts.
“City of New Orleans” is now a folk classic but Steve Goodman’s shortened life left more than a song. Along with the joy of his concerts, he offered a lesson from an old musician:
He said, You better get it while you can
If you wait too long, it'll all be gone
And you'll be sorry then
It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor
And it's the same for a woman or a man
From the cradle to the crypt
Is a mighty short trip
So you better get it while you can.
