Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:34:00

Chicago's last honky-tonk survived the neighbourhood, the taxman and two years of darkness. Carol's Pub at 4923 North Clark Street, at the corner of Clark and Leland in Uptown's Sheridan Park enclave, opened in 1972 as Pam's Playhouse under Ted Harris, an Alabama transplant who knew exactly who his customers were: the huge wave of Appalachian and southern migrants who had turned post-war Uptown into "Hillbilly Heaven," a district of honky-tonks, diners and drag-strip streets. When Ted died in 1993 his wife Carol Harris took over and gave the bar her name, keeping the Old Style cheap, the whiskey well-priced and the country music live into the small hours. The house band Diamondback became a Chicago legend in its own right, playing Carol's several nights a week for more than fifteen years, mixing Hank, Waylon, Merle and Loretta standards with enough pop and R and B to keep the floor moving as the crowd evolved - from the last of the original southern regulars to Wrigleyville twenty-somethings and Loyola students discovering that, as Carol put it, yuppies like country too. The 4 AM license made it the city's storied last stop, where cowboy boots met barflies under the "Best in Country Music" sign. Delinquent taxes cost the bar its liquor license in 2016 and Carol's went dark, presumed dead, until Ed Warm - the Joe's Bar owner and Academy of Country Music board figure - bought and renovated it as a self-described passion project, reopening in December 2018. The remodel fixed the crumbling walls and dodgy bathrooms while deliberately preserving the honky-tonk soul: memorabilia, cheap longnecks, fried-bologna sandwiches and live country and western most nights. Every other honky-tonk from Uptown's hillbilly era is gone - Sharon's Hillbilly Heaven among the last to fall - leaving Carol's as the sole survivor of Chicago's great southern migration nightlife, still two-stepping at Clark and Leland fifty years on.