If music helps make us who we are, it’s fitting that Mark Hellman is finally about to become Pete Seeger.

The theatre artist and singer has been a lifelong admirer of the folk icon. The love was a family affair: Hellman’s mom was a huge fan (she saw Seeger perform several times in the ’50s and ’60s), Seeger’s music was always on in their house, and when Hellman took up guitar at 16, his sister gave him his first guitar book: The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide by Pete Seeger.

“That book led me to all of his early influences like Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly and all the great songwriters of that period,” Hellman says, over the phone from his home in Victoria. “It sort of instilled in me as well some sense of social responsibility that is embedded in music.”

Now, almost two years after Seeger’s death, Hellman is paying tribute the best way he knows how—a musical play adapted from the singer’s own 1972 book, The Incompleat Folksinger. Hellman was commissioned to create the project by Victoria’s Other Guys Theatre Company. They bought him a banjo in June 2014, and Hellman got to work (using Seeger’s banjo guide, of course).

Hellman also cowrote the show, whittling the weighty tale down from an 800-page tome to a 40-page script. They found the book by accident, Hellman says. At first they tried to collapse Seeger’s 70-year career into a stage format, but the process was daunting. When he and the producers came across The Incompleat Folksinger, they found not only an appropriate hook but a focus: examining the first half of Seeger’s storied career.

“It’s him, in his own words, speaking about the points in his own history, the history of the world, and music in a very personal way,” Hellman says. “Other musicals about people in the business tend to turn into tribute concerts, but they don’t necessarily tell us much more about the person. Throughout the book there are all these wonderful concert moments from 1940 and touring with Woody Guthrie around the southern United States all the way up to around 1970. The song list was pretty much built straight out of the book. And in between, you get to explore the character of the man as he struggled with his own ideas and his own opinions. He started to challenge his own opinions about the way the world works. The book was the perfect vehicle.”

Hellman says the show could have been five hours instead of two. They left so much on the cutting-room floor (including Seeger’s good friend Bob Dylan) that they’re already half joking about a Volume 2 should this production be successful. (It debuted in Victoria in January, and has already played in Port Moody and Nanaimo.) But it might actually come to fruition, given the powerful new wave of civil-rights and social-justice movements, protests, and actions, including Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and Occupy.

“He was very much in favour of the Occupy movement when it started in New York,” Hellman says. “This tremendous difference between rich and poor seems to be getting more intense…and it’s being talked about even by major people running for political office. It’s quite extraordinary.”

The ideals and principles Seeger sang about, which have guided Hellman’s own career in the arts, were particularly evident in the recent federal election, Hellman says. He compares the McCarthy hearings and Communist fear-mongering of the ’50s to the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line that may have been the final straw that broke the hold of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

“When the McCarthy hearings were happening, rather than pleading the Fifth Amendment, Pete wanted to meet them head-on, and one of the lines in the book that came home to me that I kept repeating to myself was ‘If one truly loves one’s country, one should try to put the inquisitors out of business,’ ” Hellman says. “Every time we do the show, it becomes more and more important to hear these words being spoken.”

The Incompleat Folksinger runs at the Firehall Arts Centre until November 14.