BUCKY HALKER WILL BE PERFORMING IN BISHOP HILL!

As part of the Doodle Folk Music Festival on Saturday, May 31, 2025, Bucky Halker will be performing at 11:30 a.m. in the village park in Bishop Hill, IL. Please bring a lawn chair and enjoy the free concert!

Bucky Halker is a Chicago-based songwriter, performer, and historian with 15 albums to his credit, including Wisconsin 2-13-63, a two-CD project of original songs, Anywhere But Utah: Songs of Joe Hill (2015) honoring martyred labor songster Joe Hill, and The Ghost of Woody Guthrie (2012), an original music tribute to the legendary folksinger. Halker, a Ph.D. in U.S. history, has lectured and published extensively on music in America and has regularly toured Europe since 1990. He is the author of For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-1895 (University of Illinois Press) and the scholar-producer for the five-volume Folksongs of Illinois CD series. Bucky has received a host of awards for his music and writing including the Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress-American Folklife Center in 2012.

Bucky’s program is specifically sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Road Scholar Speakers Bureau. The program he is doing is called Down in the Mine: American Coal Miners and Their Songs, 1890-1960. Coal miners in Illinois and the rest of the US have a long tradition of writing poetry and music related to their occupation. This program brings that tradition to the forefront. “Down in the Mine” combines music performance (guitar and vocal) and spoken commentary. The presentation features songs and poems by coal miners, including Illinois miners. The commentary places this important folk tradition in a broader historical context and offers details on coal mining, coal-miner bards and songwriters, early country music, and individual songs.

The Doodle Folk Music Festival is funded in part by the Illinois Arts Council, Illinois Humanities Council, Galesburg Community Foundation, and the Geneseo Foundation. For more details, you can call 309 927-3899 or email bhha@mymctc.net.