For self-employed artists whose incomes have been wiped out by the shutdown, trying to access unemployment insurance and other aid is distressing. Jimi Davies, frontman of the long-running Annapolis rock band Jimmie's Chicken Shack, is one of millions of freelance musicians in the U.S.
who has lost work due to the coronavirus pandemic. And like so many, his efforts to secure government relief funds established by the CARES Act has amounted to an exercise in futility. "I got so frustrated at one point that I did a music challenge on Facebook [with an] actual recording of the [Maryland Department of Labor's] busy message," says Davies, who performs under the name Jimi Haha and estimates he has called the agency "thousands" of times without