A new rock opera tells the very metal story of a Kansas college student who died fighting fascism...

Don Henry was a 1930s college kid from Dodge City, Kansas, who left everything he knew to join the fight against fascism. His life moved one music professor to put the story down in song.
Frank Narwot first learned of Don Henry’s short life and sacrifice while glancing over a trivia display at a Lawrence, Kansas, brewpub.

“I read his story,” the guitarist and music professor at Wichita State University said, “and I was, like, ‘OK, I’ve got to write some music about this.”

What a muse. A college kid from bucolic Dodge City, Kansas, radicalized by friends and professors at the University of Kansas, lied to his family so he could fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Then he died on his first day in combat. A quest, a cause and a death fit for the stage.

It took Nawrot about five years, but in September he released the first opera to take on Henry’s story. Nawrot's “Don Henry” is a four-part series available on many podcast platforms. Its sound straddles genres.