Just a morbidly interesting update:
You may have seen
the story on the news in the past 24 hours or so from this post about the cemetery workers that have (to date) moved, removed or destroyed as many as 300 grave sites in their cemetery so that they could re-sell those grave sites to others.
This cemetery is in fact Burr Oak cemetery, the very cemetery where I took the Willie Dixon picture above, and also where Dinah Washington and many others are (or at least were) buried.
The place is today an absolute madhouse. There are thousands of people walking the place looking for their buried family members and checking to see if their sites are intact, many of them bussed in by a good dozen Cook County Sheriff Department transport buses and rented/borrowed (?) RTA public transportation buses commandeered for this specific task, the rest arriving with cars parked in every empty field and street space for blocks around the cemetery entrance. Of course there are Cook County Sheriff's Police and local Alsip Police everywhere, including a large Sheriff's Winnebago mobile command post and sheriffs patrolling the cemetery grounds in official sheriff's department *golf carts*, while forensic teams work under tents and behind screening fences on a few graves and discarded grave remains found in one remote area of the cemetery. And of course, microwave news vans from every local TV and cable station and national network parked outside. It's just an incredible (and sad) scene to behold.
I can say personally that when I visited Burr Oak back in April to get that Willie Dixon picture that I found the condition of that cemetery pretty despicable. We had a very wet spring here, and probably 1/3rd of the roads in the cemetery were underwater, along with a substantial number of gravesites, and where things were dry, many grave sites were next to impossible to find unless you knew where you were going because grove markers, row markers and other guideposts were often missing or fallen on the ground, with many of them being nothing but old wooden stakes with numbers written on their side in faded or otherwise mostly unreadable magic marker. It's not like this is an old cemetery that is no longer used; they were still burying people there today, believe it or not.
There's almost no way of knowing just how many blues legends and fathers of American roots music may have been lost to the sheer criminality and incompetence of the people running the Burr Oak cemetery, as it is one of a small number of main cemeteries around here that were the preferred resting place of the vintage Chicago music scene.
G.