On the opening track of her gorgeous new album, Sad and Beautiful World, Mavis Staples raises her voice in a chorus that could serve as an anthem for this city: “Maybe things will be better in Chicago.”

Simply titled “Chicago,” the song was originally recorded by Tom Waits. Like much of his music, it was rollicking if a bit abrasive and weird. But even amid all of the clattering noise, you could hear a real gem of a song, with lyrics reflecting on Chicago’s long history as a magnet for people seeking a better life.

“The seeds are planted here, but they won’t grow / We won’t have to say goodbye if we all go / Maybe things will be better in Chicago…”

When Waits released the track on his 2011 record Bad as Me, he said the album’s songs included “music for immigrants.” This particular song could be about immigrants coming to Chicago from just about anywhere — some place where seeds won’t grow, either literally or metaphorically. But more than anything else, this bluesy number feels like a story about the millions of African Americans who fled from the South and its cruel Jim Crow laws in the 20th century. They made their way north to cities including Chicago, which they saw as a sort of promised land.

“To leave all we’ve ever known for a place we’ve never seen / Maybe things will be better in Chicago / Well, it’s brave for us to stay, even braver to go away / Wherever they go, I go …”

Now comes an uplifting version by the beloved Mavis Staples, a vibrant 86-year-old who knows more than a few things about Chicago and the Great Migration. She was born in Chicago in 1939, three years after her father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, had joined the exodus north from Mississippi, arriving in Chicago with a thin jacket in the midst of winter. “Roebuck was never going back to the cotton fields if he could help it, no matter how out of place he felt in this cold, dirty city,” Greg Kot wrote in his 2014 book I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway. 

As all those migrants learned, Chicago wasn’t really a paradise. But for the Staples family and countless others, life was better here. When Pops and his children formed the Staple Singers gospel group, Chicago was their home base. They became pop stars as well as civil rights champions. In 1965, Mavis took the lead vocals on “Freedom Highway,” a song written by her father, boldly declaiming: “March for freedom’s highway / March each and every day / Made up my mind and I won’t turn around.”

A similar spirit animates her lively new rendition of “Chicago.” The Waits recording was already one of my favorite songs about this city, but I recognize that Waits, with his gravelly voice and his often-dense arrangements, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Now, thanks to Staples, we have two terrific versions of this “Chicago.” She has put her own personal stamp on it, making a more accessible recording with an infectious groove.

“What we need, the Lord will give us / All we want, we carry with us / You know where I can be found / Where the rainbow hits the ground / I’m not alone, I’m not afraid, not alone, not afraid / ’Cause this bird, little bird, this bird left its cage…”

This isn’t the first song about the city’s role in the Great Migration. That theme can also be detected in two of the most iconic Chicago songs, although it’s somewhat hidden.

Originally recorded in 1936 by blues pioneer Robert Johnson, “Sweet Home Chicago” can be interpreted as an “invitation for Blacks to flee the Jim Crow South for opportunity elsewhere,” Chicago’s Edward McClelland wrote. Johnson’s song was a rewrite of an older blues tune about going to Kokomo, Indiana — Johnson replaced “Kokomo” with “Chicago,” while adding a geographically puzzling reference to “the land of California.” The Blues Brothers and most other singers have left out the part about California when they covered “Sweet Home Chicago.” The Great Migration may indeed be the song’s subtext, although Johnson’s words don’t make that exactly clear. Why is the narrator asking his “baby” to go to Chicago? As in many blues songs, the backstory is rather nebulous.

Another ubiquitous song, “Chicago (That Toddling Town),” celebrates the city as a place where people have fun — doing things like toddling, an infantile style of dancing that was a craze in the 1920s — even when moral scolds like the evangelist Billy Sunday try to shut the town down. When Frank Sinatra recorded the most popular version in 1957, he didn’t sing all the verses of Fred Fisher’s 1922 song. Some of the lyrics omitted by Sinatra describe Chicago’s growing African American population: “More colored people up in State Street you can see / Than you’ll see in Louisiana or Tennessee.” The Great Migration was originally a subtext in this song, too, even if that part gets skipped over by Sinatra and just about every other singer.

You may prefer other songs about Chicago. Perhaps you feel nostalgia for those 1970s hits “The Night Chicago Died” and “Lake Shore Drive.” Or maybe you’d rather hear Wilco’s “Via Chicago” or Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago.” One of my personal faves, the Handsome Family’s darkly humorous tale of death and desolation, “The Woman Downstairs,” is far too bleak to ever serve as a tourism jingle. There are so many songs about this city — Wikipedia has a list of around 700, including 50 titled “Chicago” — and they cover a huge range of themes. Local tunesmiths wrote quite a few of these songs, but the city has also inspired musicians from all over.

Although Tom Waits is a Californian, he clearly has an affinity for Chicago. In the mid-1970s, when he performed at least 10 concerts at the Quiet Knight, he often stayed in a nearby hotel for transients, at 933 West Belmont Avenue. “The woman who was the night clerk at the Wilmont Hotel, her son is the Marlboro Man, and that’s how I got into show business,” Waits told WXRT, in one of his typically outlandish tales. Waits also spent months in Chicago in 1986, when he starred in Steppenwolf Theatre’s staging of his musical Frank’s Wild Years at the Briar Street Theatre. Waits cowrote that play — and many of his songs — with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, who has roots in the Chicago area. As Waits accurately crooned in a wistful piano ballad about Brennan, “she grew up outside McHenry in Johnsburg, Illinois.” Waits has sprinkled other Illinois towns into his lyrics, singing about a circus camped in “a pasture outside Kankakee,” a soldier who misses “old Rockford town,” and a guy in trouble with the law who “left Waukegan at the slamming of the door.”

But Waits had never devoted an entire song to this city until he released “Chicago,” which he wrote with Brennan, as the opening cut on Bad as Me. The track features guitarist Keith Richards, who famously channeled his love for Chicago blues into the sound of the Rolling Stones. A loud horn section propels the track, pulsing and chugging like a locomotive, and Waits shouts, “All aboard! All aboard!” in the final moments. When this album came out, Pitchfork asked Waits how he comes up with his musical arrangements. “Sometimes words are just music themselves,” he said. “Like ‘Chicago’ is a very musical sounding name.”

Waits played “Chicago” on The Late Show With David Letterman in 2012, but he has never actually performed the song in Chicago. Waits hasn’t been here for a concert since 2006, and he hasn’t done a full concert anywhere since 2008. Waits, who turns 76 in December, occasionally acts in movies, but his musical career appears to be in hibernation. He hasn’t released an album in the 14 years since Bad as Me.

“Chicago” was finally performed in front of a Chicago crowd in June, when Mavis Staples sang it during her headlining concert at the Chicago Blues Festival in Millennium Park. And “Chicago” will almost surely be on the set list for her January 10 show at the Chicago Theatre. Her rousing studio version was released November 7, featuring riffing by guitarists Derek Trucks and Buddy Guy — another Black migrant from the South who moved to Chicago.

While the song feels inspired by the Great Migration, the lyrics are vague enough that they might describe migrants coming to Chicago from any number of places around the world: Irish folks fleeing starvation during the Great Famine of the 1840s, or Venezuelans abandoning their beleaguered country in the 21st century, to cite just two examples. To countless people across nearly two centuries, Chicago has been a beacon of hope. 

The song tempers that hope with the word “maybe” — “Maybe things will be better in Chicago.” Migrants setting their eyes on Chicago may wonder if the city will live up to their expectations. Indeed, many people over the years have encountered hard times once they get here. If you’re a Chicagoan listening to this song, it might prompt you to wonder whether Chicago can do a better job of being a welcoming city.

The song’s final verse touches on the love that many migrants feel for their homelands, in spite of all the troubles they’re trying to escape:

“There’s so much magic we have known / On this sapphire we call home / With my coat and my hat / I say goodbye to all of that / Maybe things will be better, maybe things will be better, maybe things will be better in Chicago…”

Hearing Mavis Staples sing those lines, I feel hope. Maybe things will be better in Chicago.