As an undergraduate at Michigan State in the early 70s, David Hinkamp often traveled to Chicago to hang out at the Jazz Record Mart, where proprietor Bob Koester would update him on the best spots in town to hear blues and jazz. “I came on my 21st birthday,” Hinkamp says, “with the sole purpose of getting Koester and going to some great place. He sent us to this place, Club Motown–63rd and the Dan Ryan.” On an abandoned street that resembled “a bombed-out shooting gallery,” he found a mini blues festival: “Mighty Joe Young, Hound Dog Taylor, Elmore James Jr. I was hooked. I determined early that I wanted to come here at some point.”
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After earning his medical degree from the University of Michigan, Hinkamp came to Cook County Hospital to do a residency in occupational medicine, and then signed on as an attending physician. (He’s also on staff at the University of Illinois Medical Center and a faculty member at UIC’s School of Public Health.) In 1982, he says, “one of the blues legends showed up at my clinic and was having a difficult time–not only health problems, but financial problems. That really brought the thing home to me. Chicago is saturated with world-class musicians. Chicago ought to be the place, if there was ever a place, where the community rallies around its arts communities and supports them in every way possible.”
In the late 80s, at his urging, Hinkamp contacted vocalist Valerie Wellington, who was trying to organize the Chicago Blues Coalition to assist musicians with things like retirement planning and housing. But the program never quite got off the ground–Wellington died in 1993, “right at the point where it needed somebody like her to be leading,” says Hinkamp.
