Blues of Achilles: A Musical Performance

For almost two decades, Chicago-based musician and classics degree-holder Joe Goodkin has toured the United States. Recently, Goodkin has created a 17-song adaptation of the Iliad steeped in ancient and modern war literature. He plays his music at VA hospitals as part of recreational therapy for veterans experiencing PTSD and other related war traumas. Goodkin’s first-person songs capture the horror, grief and love that permeate the Iliad and the combat experience. Sung from the perspective of Achilles, Priam, Patroklus, Briseis, Helen, Andromache and more, The Blues of Achilles evokes “the truths that the Iliad conveys [through] songs that [are] real and now” in the words of Tom Palaima, Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin.