Here’s a guy you might not know, along with a guy you probably do know. Both are life-long friends of Robert Long from the old days in Chicago. Win Stracke was an American folk musician and co-founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, where this portrait now resides. Win was a Chicago fixture in music, theater, and television in the 1940s and was known for his booming bass voice. He was one of the ensemble who populated “Studs’ Place,” a Chicago television show from the late 1940s hosted by Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The Good War and Working, among others. Studs’ picture hangs behind his old friend Win.
This is typical of Robert Long’s portrait works. He disliked formal poses and sought to place each subject naturally, to create an impression of the whole person. In his early career as a young man in Chicago, Long relied on portrait commissions for his livelihood.
