Down from Another Mountain: Learn how "We Shall Overcome" and "Which Side Are You On" came down from the mountains...

The Appalachian Vanguard Tour hits Chicago on Thursday, April 27th, 7pm, at the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park, as part of the national tour for Jeff Biggers' new book, The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America (Shoemaker and Hoard). The event is free.

Parts of Uptown Chicago were once an Appalachian neighborhood; in the 50s, it was known as "hillbilly heaven" and rife with the negative stereotypes of Appalachians that remain today: poor, ignorant, racist hillbillies.

"Uptown Chicago Revisted: An Evening at the Appalachian Vanguard" tells a different story: From diva Nina Simone, young, gifted and black, blues icons Bessie Smith and WC Handy, the Carter Family and country music, to the birth of the first Declaration of Independence, the first abolitionist newspaper, the labor battles that taught you Which Side Are You On, to Adolph Ochs and the southern mountain roots of the NY Times, to the birth of literary naturalism in the US in 1861 and a diverse array of authors from Pearl S. Buck, Nikki Giovanni, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, Thomas Wolfe and James Agee, and African American pioneers Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington, Carter Woodson and Henry Louis Gates, and the legendary Highlander Folk School--which trained Rosa Parks and the shock troops of the civil rights movement, the Appalachia Vanguard is a poetic rendering of how the country's most maligned region has changed the way we live in America.

For more information on the book, please see: www.jeffbiggers.com

"The shameless caricatures-'hillbilly' and 'redneck'-have in popular thought defined the people of Appalachia, in the mountains of the Cumberlands. If
ever there were a folk most enlightened in the world of haves and have-nots, exercising their first amendment rights with more guts than our 'respectable
media,' it is the heroic survivors in the hills and hollows. Among those that have long gone were Joe and Gaynell Begley, who ran a general store in
a Kentucky ghost town made so by strip miners and corporate lawyers, and Myles Horton, one of our great educators, whose Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee taught students, black and white, among whom were Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They learned at Highlander where the body was buried and who was doing what to whom. There have been so many others, including Nina Simone, the black singer, and Florence Reece, a miner's daughter who wrote, 'Which Side Are You On?' Jeff Biggers's inspiring book should be a best seller immediately. It is a 'how-to' book-how to assert your fundamental rights and how to speak out in the manner of t he American Revolution footsloggers, whose descendants they are. Read it and your faltering hopes will rise." --Studs Terkel