Listen to Looch: Derrick Stevens talks about 'MLK 50'
by Mary Lucia
April 03, 2018
This week, Mary Lucia talks to Derrick Stevens, production manager at The Current and also the host and producer of MLK 50: The Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, airing Wednesday, April 4, from 12 to 4 p.m.
"When I first started to put it together, I was like, 'OK, I want to do something different than just playing a song and front-selling it and back-selling it'," Derrick says. "I wanted to try and incorporate a lot of the civil rights movement music that still resonates today, and a lot of it does. And then what I wanted to do was actually grab some voices from the Twin Cities area … I just wanted to get voices from the community that could speak to what the community was like in 1968, when Martin Luther King was killed -- or within the '60s itself, during the civil rights movement."
When putting the program together, Derrick was a bit surprised to learn Pete Seeger had written songs about the Civil Rights Movement, so Derrick will be featuring a couple of those songs. "And then of course, we're going to look at some of the newer musicians — John Legend, the Roots," Derrick says, "those guys taking some of the older civil rights songs and putting a new spin on it and releasing it today, and you can kind of see how it still works today."
Listen to MLK 50: The Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, Wednesday, April 4, from 12 to 4 p.m.
Resources
The King Center - official site