The last time Bill Schustik was in Wilson, he stood alone on the Fike High School Auditorium stage and performed his American Troubadour show for subscribers to the now-defunct Wilson Concert series. That was about 25 years ago. He’s back, and this time his solo act has a choir and some musicians to back him up.
Schustik kicked off the 2011 edition of Theater of the American South Thursday night with a look back 150 years with his “The Civil War in Song and Legend” show. Although Schustik has been performing as a one-man show through much of his career, he chose to involve some local talent in his Theater of the American South performance. He proved that he “plays well with others,” especially the St. John AME Zion Unity Choir whose soloists Toshika Smith and Jean Jones provided a nice contrast to Schustik’s rich baritone. Jones’ soprano filled the Boykin Center on “Let My People Go” and “Motherless Child.” The 17-member choir under the direction of local musical legend Bill Myers sang harmony as well as lead vocals, giving Schustik’s troubadour act a new dimension. Young singers/musicians/dancers dubbed The Many Thousand Gone Youth Chorus also added to the show, especially with their toe-tapping drumbeats.
Myers, playing flute and melodica, and other local musicians supplemented Schustik’s talent on a variety of instruments, including guitar, banjo, harmonica, dulcimer, drum and jaw harp. Abby Dorfmann on the fiddle stood out among these skilled supporting musicians, and also sang a haunting ballad.
Last night’s performance was originally pitched as a one-man show, and it’s obvious that Schustik can hold the stage by himself. As he moved confidently from one instrument to another and from one musical style to others, this self-described troubadour conjured songs of yore and the history of a nation. As talented as a storyteller as he is as a musician, Schustik taught Civil War history by telling personal stories of the men and women who lived through it or died in it. And the Civil War facts he subtly teaches are, as Mark Twain might say, “mostly true.”
At times Thursday night, the mood was as much like the 1960s as it was the 1860s. Schustik’s rendition of “Follow the Drinking Gourd” brought back memories of the late folk singer Josh White on the “Hootenanny” television show 50 years ago. And his “Cumberland Gap” could have been sung by the New Christy Minstrels or by the Limelighters. Schustik’s style is clearly lost in the sixties of both the 19th and the 20th centuries.
He guided his embarrassingly small opening-night audience through the Civil War playlist of raucous, boastful, longing and mournful songs, telling the story of songs each side in the war adopted as its own. He told of Julia Ward Howe writing new words to a military marching song to create “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; of the contradiction of Shiloh, a biblical name meaning “place of peace” where 20,000 perished; and of the poignancy of the empty chair at the table and soldiers’ wish to “perish nobly.”
At the end of the two-hour show, the audience stood reverently as Schustik sang the little-known latter verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The audience continued standing and clapped their hands to the beat as Schustik and the entire company sang “This Land is Your Land,” the Woody Guthrie song written long after the Civil War, but a poignantly perfect fit to close this show.
—Hal Tarleton
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