Library Friends Webinar: Spaces Speak: Sounds of Champaign-Urbana between 1968 and 2022

From spacious concert halls to packed bars, people’s homes, sidewalks, and local churches, the Champaign-Urbana community has been filled with the sound of music. For the last one hundred years, all these performance spaces have helped shape our community’s music tastes—each venue speaking in its own unique way.

C-U’s diverse performance spaces—Mabels, Huff Gym, the Red Lion, Nature’s Table, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Chances R, Parkland College, the Red Herring, Foellinger Auditorium, the Iron Post, Memorial Stadium, Smith Music Hall, the Rose Bowl,  Altgeld Hall, the Canopy Club,  the State Farm Center, and the Virginia Theatre—have played and continue to play a vital role defining who we are as a community.

Our noon-time presentation will explore through photographs and audio-visual recordings the music and performers that played in many of these unique venues including Dan Fogelberg, Guido Sinclair, Adrian Belew, Marching Illini, the University of Illinois Black Chorus, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, and many others. We will also discuss Fogelberg’s 1976 performance at the Virginia Theater and his 1981 and 1993 performances at the Assembly Hall as well as the Farm Aid concerts held at Memorial Stadium in 1985.