AllMusic Review
Review by William Ruhlmann

On his 60th birthday, Bob Gibson recorded this live album in a Chicago recording studio before a small invited audience. Gibson sought to sum up his career, and he succeeded. Gibson always occupied a middle position in postwar folk music, taking it up in the mid-’50s after a business career.

By the early ’60s, Gibson, like other folksingers, was turning to more topical concerns, though he was bypassed by the quickly changing trends in folk and folk-rock in the mid-’60s. After virtually a decade-long lost weekend, he returned to action in the mid-’70s to find the folk boom less than an echo. The last few songs in the concert displayed the results, from the anthemic “I Hear America Singing” to the rueful biography-in-song “Living Legend” and the more philosophical “Stops Along the Way.”

It is a convention to suggest that Bob Gibson is little more than a footnote to the folk revival of the late ’50s and early ’60s, but listening to this album one hears his unmistakable influence on a generation of folk-pop singers including Steve Goodman, John Prine, John Denver, and Harry Chapin. The influence is apparent in the very timbre of his voice as well as in the humor and hopefulness of his approach to music. That approach remained much the same, even if Gibson was a little wistful, at this concert.

Though his friends helped him put together a country-oriented final album (Makin’ a Mess: Bob Gibson Plays Shel Silverstein) in 1994, this concert is really Gibson’s last performance in the style he forged over 40 years of shows. It gives an excellent impression of a long underrated singer and songwriter and, despite being a valedictory, provides the best introduction to his work.