Stephen Marley and Jr. Gong
Bluebird
March 29, 9 p.m.

When the weather starts getting warmer and the sun shines for hours on end, it’s usually about time for reggae to make its way into my stereo. Whenever I hear those bouncing rhythms and breezy guitar, it instantly sends me on my very own Caribbean vacation.

Susan Swaney hopes to build on some Hoosiers’ knowledge about the historic labor leader Eugene V. Debs, a man whose time she argues has returned.

“People have either never heard of him or barely heard of him,” the artistic director of the Bloomington-based Voces Novae chamber choir says. “They’ve read about him in their high school government textbooks, along with the muckrakers and Theodore Dreiser. You know, it was kind of a paragraph in my high school text.”

Indeed, history written in the post-McCarthy era, she argues, has all but forgotten Debs, at best, or maligned him, at worst.

“He was kind of tainted,” she says. “The implication was he was one of those pinkos who was always stirring up trouble,” which, as those who attend the May 19 Voces Novae performance of Eugene V. Debs: An Indiana Original will learn, is an apt description.