Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road with Chris Vallillo

Hayner Library at Alton Square Mall Performance Room (Upper Level) Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 6:00 p.m. “Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road” is a powerful new musical performance featuring the songs, stories, and struggles of the Illinois Underground Railroad. The program was developed by Looking for Lincoln to be performed in conjunction with communities hosting the exhibit. The show features rare first-person accounts of freedom-seekers who passed through Illinois. Highlighted stories include John and Mary Little, who traveled on foot 140 miles to Chicago, and George Burroughs, a Black Canadian who worked on the Illinois Central Railroad, where he helped smuggle escapees to freedom. 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. Vallillo combines these powerful stories with eleven historic songs that were sung by the enslaved to inspire and share knowledge among themselves. Always a project-oriented artist, in the early 2000s Vallillo began creating one-person shows using music as the vehicle to explore a subject or theme. His 2008 project, Abraham Lincoln in Song, received the endorsement of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the CD reached number ten on Billboard’s Bluegrass Album Chart. In 2016, his recording, Oh Freedom! Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, charted at number six on the folk charts, and the show was staged with a band and full choir at Western Illinois University. That show was videotaped and syndicated on Illinois Public Television. Please call 1-800-613-3163 to register for this program.