Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road

Looking for Lincoln will present the premiere performance of award winning folk musician Chris Vallillo’s powerful new show, Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road in Theater 1 at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site Visitor Center.  Vallillo’s performance brings the music and stories of the Underground Railroad in Illinois to life in this engaging and powerful show. Vallillo extensively researched the subject using primary source documents such as the 1857 Slave Narratives of Canada and the WPA Slave Narratives as well as the most recent scholarship on the subject. 

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.

Vallillo combines these powerful stories with the historic songs that were sung by the enslaved to inspire and share knowledge among themselves. The Gospel music that told of the Israelites escape from Egypt resonated powerfully with the Freedom Seekers and inspired many to seek their own emancipation. Songs like Go Down Moses and Steal Away were universally known and sung by the enslaved. Vallillo performs eleven of these songs as he weaves in the stories of the lives and struggles of these heroic men and women.

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.

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 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.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.