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Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road
Award winning folk musician and folklorist Chris Vallillo brings the music and the stories of the Underground Railroad in Illinois to life in this engaging and powerful show featuring first person accounts of Freedom Seekers as well as performances and insights into the music that drove this historic movement. “While traditional accounts of the underground railroad generally dismiss Illinois, our state had more miles bordering slave states than any other” said Vallillo “and those borders were rivers which made for excellent escape routes.”
Vallillo extensively researched the subject going back to primary source documents such as the 1856 Slave Narratives of Canada and numerous other slave narratives, as well as much of the most recent scholarly work on the subject. “These are amazing accounts of self determined people who took tremendous risks to gain their freedom, often with virtually no knowledge of the world beyond their immediate location” said Vallillo. “It’s a testament to the resilient human desire for freedom.”
The show features rare first person accounts of freedom seekers who passed through Illinois such as John and Mary Little who traveled one hundred and forty miles to get to the Ohio River, crossed the river on a log, and walked barefooted through Illinois up to Chicago.
Then there was George Burroughs, a free black man from Canada, who traveled to Illinois and got a job on the Illinois Central Railroad where he helped smuggle escapees to freedom.
Chris Vallillo- presents "Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road" April 5, 2pm-Madden Auditorium
Chris Vallillo is a singer/songwriter and roots musician who makes the people and places of “unmetropolitan” America come to life in song. Having spent the last 30 years in the rural Midwest, he has a natural affinity for American roots music. Vallillo weaves original, contemporary, and traditional songs and narratives into a compelling and entertaining portrait of the history and lifestyles of the Midwest. Dirty Linen magazine described the music as, “vivid, original story songs”delivered with an “eye for detail and a sense of history”. In the 1980’s he was involved documenting the last of the pre-radio generation of musicians in rural Illinois. A multi-instrumentalist, Vallillo performs on acoustic guitar and bottleneck slide guitar as well as old time banjo in this show. His music has a timeless quality about it, re-creating old songs while keeping them fresh to the ear. “I want to be true to the historic nature of the piece, but I also want it to feel new and alive.” Always a project oriented artist, in the early 2000’s Vallillo began creating one man shows using music as the vehicle to explore a subject or theme. His 2008 project, titled Abraham Lincoln in Song, received the endorsement of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the CD reached #10 on Billboard’s Bluegrass Album Chart. In 2016, his recording, Oh Freedom! Songs of the Civil Rights Movement Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road charted at # 6 on the folk charts and the show was staged with a band and full choir at Western IL University. That show was video taped and syndicated on Illinois Public Television. In 2024 Chris returned to his songwriter roots with a new recording and stage performance, Forgottonia, featuring original songs and instrumentals written about about rural Illinois.