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

Related

• Selma: The Roots Run Deep
• Selma: The Roots Run Deep, part 2