The long and winding and tune-filled road that Chris Vallillo has been traveling for decades will find him this weekend in the cozy 80-seat, cabaret-like 1700 Theater space inside Steppenwolf Theatre.
He will be joined by acclaimed musicians Don Stiernberg on mandolin and Marc Edelstein on bass, all of their music embellished by the striking black-and-white photos of Tim Schroll. The show is titled “Forgottonia” and, as Vallillo told me Sunday, “I like to think of this as Bruce Springsteen meets the ‘Prairie Home Companion.”
We talked over the phone as he was making his way from a performance in Baldwin, Michigan, to a show in Downers Grove. He’s always been a man on the move. Born in Hammond, Indiana, he and his family were often on the road, adjusting to his father’s job as a civil engineer. He and his three brothers were living in New Castle, Pennsylvania, when he was initially drawn to music. Like other young men at the time, he figured playing guitar was “a good way to meet girls … and I can never remember a time when I wasn’t drawn to the guitar,” he says. “Finally, in sixth grade my parents gave in.”
He taught himself to play, and with some musically inclined college roommates got serious about his music and “got sorta-kinda good,” he says.
By the time he received a degree in archaeology from Beloit College, he realized, “I did not want to pursue a Ph.D. That would have enabled me to stay in classrooms, teaching others and that was not for me. I enjoyed the fieldwork, and I was becoming more and more passionate about music, about the stories that people told in songs. I wanted to combine those passions.”
And he has been doing so ever since, his guitar work greatly admired, with FolkWax magazine editor Arthur Wood writing, “Vallillo’s guitar playing flows like warm honey and is a true aural delight.”
He has also crafted such shows as the remarkable “Abraham Lincoln in Song,” a 2007 album that was such a fine gathering of tunes that it was endorsed by the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. And there has been 2015’s “Oh Freedom! Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” a stirring gathering of which he says, “Songs filled the movement. They bred inspiration, courage and solidarity in the face of the ever-present threat of violence. Freedom songs would be the glue that held the movement together.”
“Forgottonia” is the result of decades of thoughtful creativity, all seeded during an archaeological field trip he took in 1976. That was when he discovered “Forgottonia.”
That was the name of an “independent nation” created in the late 1960s by a group of creative and politically savvy private citizens, business folks and others who lived in 16 western Illinois counties.
More Top Picks Best Leather Shoes For Women Standing All Day
It was born out of their frustration at the lack of state and federal government support for regional transportation and infrastructure projects. As Vallillo told me a few years back, “It was great political theater. The plan was to secede from the country, declare war on the United States, immediately surrender and apply for foreign aid.”
It was effective, as the Tribune editorialized in 1974, writing, “We sympathize with the proposed state of Forgottonia … ignored by state and federal government. … Others of us, too, have come from just such unremembered areas — hometowns eternally doomed to be snubbed and forgotten.”
Money and projects began to pour into the area.
“When I arrived in 1976 to do archaeological research, it was like stepping back 40 years in time, visiting these small farming communities, talking to people in diners, and hearing their music,” Vallillo told me. “I was enchanted and began to realize that there is a story behind every song, stories of what the music meant to the people who created it.”
The songs started to come. Eventually there was an album and radio airplay. On the venerable “The Midnight Special” on WFMT-FM 98.7, host Marilyn Rea Beyer called it “a memorable set of sprightly tunes and songs rich in imagery and idiosyncratic characters.”
I called the album “a 12-tune marvel that captures stories of people and place and transports listeners to vibrant bygone times.”
It has been awarded some grant money and has been well received when presented a handful of times in such places as Western Illinois University in Macomb, the Orpheum Theatre in Galesburg and the Schuyler Performing Arts Center in Rushville.
It has been called a “multi-media love letter,” and Kevin Maynard, former executive director of the Quad Cities Arts council, says, “The show is incredible … as Chris shared stories and music. It is about that region of Illinois, but really is a look at rural America.”
“It has always been my intention to bring this to the big city,” said Vallillo, who lives in west-central Macomb where he and his wife Dorie, a former NPR radio station manager, raised their adult daughter, Maggie. “I wrote letters, I made phone calls to a lot of Chicago theaters, but I just got no response. Eventually I was able to talk to the folks at Steppenwolf, and so here we are.”
“So I am absolutely thrilled. Eager to see how an urban audience will react to a rural show. I am confident.”
I believe him, in part because I take to heart something he told me long ago. “Folk music is not a static thing at all. It is a living, breathing thing. It is music that evolves, reflecting everyday people’s lives, concerns, struggles.”
If you go
“Forgottonia” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 8 and 3 p.m. Aug. 9 as part of the LookOut Series in Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted St.; tickets and more information at www.steppenwolf.org
More Top Picks Best Dining Tables