Bluegrass Ambassador
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Covington, 48, is best known locally for having owned Biddy Mulligan’s, the now defunct north-side club he bought not once, but twice. He first acquired the bar in 1978, and the hard-core Chicago blues acts he booked drew a steady clientele of Northwestern students, tourists, and aficionados from all over the city. “I would buy ads in the Defender,” he says, “and you can’t do that if you’re going to bring in ‘Hey Bartender’ bands from Schaumburg.” He also met his future wife, Sari, in ’78, and they were married at the club the following year. In 1981 he sold Biddy’s so he’d have time to start a family; he and Sari moved to her native Finland, where he landed a job doing sound for a film company.
Over the next ten years Covington booked topflight acts like Hot Rize, Rhonda Vincent, and the Chicago quartet Special Consensus for the festival, and often organized short Finnish tours for the groups to offset the cost of flying musicians overseas. Covington also started putting together blues tours in ’89 and selling sponsorship of the packages to Finnish beer companies. When the Finnish economy tanked in the early 90s, Covington stopped booking tours. Around that time he heard from another old bluegrass friend, Tommi Viksten, who’d begun playing with a folk ensemble named Varttina; Covington spent a couple of years managing, promoting, and booking the band, which spearheaded a Scandinavian folk revival. But he quit when they moved toward a poppier sound, and by 1993 he was working for his brother, selling advertising specialties like stickers and mugs. He had mostly left the biz behind–though he still booked the Ruotsinpyhtaa festival.
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