Chris
Vallillo studied archeology in college, but when that didn't suit
him professionally, he decided to give music a shot.
"I figured if I was going to starve, I was going to go ahead and try to play music and just see if I could make a living at it," he said in an interview last week.
But Vallillo's vocational choices aren't all that different: Both archeology and the study of folk music involve the excavation of artifacts to help illuminate the way people lived deep in the past. Vallillo - a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and folklorist based out of Macomb - is one of the main-stage performers at the Midwest Folk Festival this weekend in Bishop Hill, Illinois.
"I've just always had an interest in history and the past," he said. "When we're doing archeology, what we're looking to find out is about the everyday lives of people. We know the big battles and the huge political forces that happened over the last several thousand years. But what we don't know are the details of people's lives. ... I sort of applied that same concept to the collecting of music, and it gave me this depth of feeling and understanding about how this music was used, and what it meant to people, and how it worked."
But when he left archeology in the late 1970s, he didn't leap into folk music. He played in a typical touring band for five years before becoming a solo artist. And then in 1986 he applied for an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and received it.
"That really made a tremendous difference to me personally," he said, "because all of a sudden, an institution of worth was giving me a pat on the back, saying, ‘Yeah, we like what you're doing and we think that it's worth pursuing in this artistic form,' rather than singing in a bar, which is not what I wanted to do."
Since that fellowship, Vallillo and Illinois cultural agencies have periodically renewed their relationship. Vallillo co-produced the Folk Songs of Illinois CD for the Illinois Humanities Council in 2003 and did the field work for the Illinois Arts Council's Illinois Mississippi River Valley Project.
He's also hosted and co-produced a nationally syndicated public-radio show, Rural Route 3, and earned praise for both his songwriting and his guitar-playing. Dirty Linen wrote, "He brings to his music [an] eye for detail and a sense of history, ... vivid original story songs delivered in his crisp, expressive tenor."
His work collecting the songs and stories of the rural Midwest have had a profound impact on his songwriting, he said. In the mid-1980s, he said, "I was actually sent into rural Illinois to interview and record the last of those folks that were born in the days before recorded music and radio and television. Their songs and stories are a large part of what I perform today, and they were a huge influence on the music I write.
"I always like the know the story behind the song," he said. "It was like being given a license to talk to these people that would not normally talk to some person off the street. But I had the credibility of doing this project for the arts council. All of a sudden, these folks that had this tremendous knowledge - which they didn't really think was all that important - were willing to tell me their stories. And it was the most wonderful thing. And I remember thinking that I would have gladly done this for free. Of course, I don't want to tell that to anybody."
The project "allowed me to get into the lives of these people," he said.
Although some people might find the study of old songs quaint, Vallillo learned from them. "A song that lasts a hundred years lasts that long for a good reason," he said. "It connects with people in a very basic way."
The main lesson is that perfection is overrated. "At times it feels more important to go with a gut reaction than being so concerned about everything being precisely correct and properly structured," he said. "Because more often than not, they [folk songs] are not. ... There is just some certain spark in it that resonates with people in such a way [that] the song is still sung.
"What I've learned is to look for that spark. It's very difficult to define."
Of course, not all the old songs hold up very well. Humor, in particular, doesn't seem to transcend time. "A lot of songs that were considered incredibly funny in 1880 just aren't that funny in 2006," he said. "The context that we see these things in has radically changed, too. The whole nature of the country is completely different."
Vallillo is now working on a six-city traveling tour of the Smithsonian's "New Harmonies" exhibit. The roots-music tour will be visiting six cities - all with fewer than 25,000 residents - in 2007 and 2008, and Vallillo is the state scholar for Illinois. "My job is to help each of those six communities discover and create their own portion of the exhibit that reflects that community's roots music, or folk music," he said.
He's also hoping to record his "Abraham Lincoln in Song" project, which includes songs that the president knew. But that project will need to wait until winter, which is an unexpected situation for a man who thought he might end up a starving artist.
"I'll be pretty much performing five to seven days a week between now and the end of October," he said. "That's a positive problem. I'm not complaining."
To listen to the Reader interview with Chris Vallillo, go to (http://www.qcspan.com).
