David Rovics is a political folk singer and songwriter whose music deals with issues such as social justice, globalization, labor struggles, and war. He has performed at rallies and protests across the nation, and has been outspoken against the Iraq War, as well as both the Democratic and Republican parties.

I had the opportunity to meet Rovics on March 31, 2007, when he played to a crowd at the Center for Progressive Studies and Culture in Corpus Christi, TX. I interviewed him that night at Corpus Christi’s LULAC Council No. 1.

How long have you been playing music and touring?

It’s been about 10 years full time, and before that I was playing music for years, but mostly in the Boston subway system. And then I started doing more “indoor gigs,” as my friend Christian puts it. He stopped playing in the subways.

So you just stood out there with a guitar and had the case open?

Yeah, exactly. Street music. It’s a vibrant tradition all over the world, and goes way back in Boston. And my preference was the subways.

How did you get into this music lifestyle? What drew you to playing music in the first place?

In the first place, my parents are both classical musicians, so I grew up playing classical cello and I learned how to read and write music as a kid. And then I got into rock and roll as a teenager, and then I sort of rediscovered the whole, really broadly speaking folk tradition in late teens, early twenties. I started writing really bad songs and then discovered that there were other people who had written really good ones. I didn’t know that there were people doing this, like writing stuff about what was happening in the world. I was at the point where I had just heard Crosby, Stills and Nash, and stuff like that. And then I discovered this whole body of other music out there, and then eventually discovered how broad this whole tradition was around the world. That was in my early twenties. I kind of worked at it for a while and started writing better songs by the time I was in my late twenties, I suppose.

How would you describe the sort of music you play? Anarchist folk music is what I tend to think of it as.

I think the political themes that I tend to deal with tend to be broad enough that they could be anarchist or socialist or syndicalist or any number of left-wing philosophies. If there’s a song that seems to have an anarchist bent to it, it’s often because that historical event had an anarchist bent to it. Take for example the Blair Mountain song that I wrote about the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virigina. There was this whole ethic of the people involved with that particular point in history, where they had actually rejected all the leadership of their union and had gone against the wishes of everybody in any leadership position. Ten thousand of them went to lay siege to the town of Mingo anyway. It turned out to be a pretty pivotal point in the history of labor struggle and it just happened that in that particular situation, they had rejected all their leadership anyway. So that would be something that might make people think, “Oh, it’s an anarchist theme song kind of thing,” but I think it’s more. And that’s fine if people think of it that way, but I don’t know how many of those people would have necessarily considered themselves anarchists. When you take a moment in history, you can interpret it in various ways.

David Rovics playing at the Progressive Center

It’s definitely folk music, but then again so is anything that’s not paid for, basically, in the broad definition. But it’s also folk music in the more narrow definition, the way the term tends to be used since the sixties, which is a real uncomfortable thing for me. The term is just a problem, I think, the term ‘folk music’. What it’s come to mean since the sixties is basically, more or less, white guys with guitars playing songs that are somewhat derivative of traditional Appalachian music, but not traditional Appalachian music. And then it became very popular, so that in a way also is antithetical to the whole tradition of folk music, because what distinguishes folk music broadly from the only other form of music which existed prior to the music industry, you could say, is there’s folk music and there’s classical music. Folk music is stuff that people write because they want to write it. They write for each other, for themselves, for their community, as opposed to classical music, which was paid for by rich people. And certainly there were classical composers who I’m sure were writing just what they wanted to write, but most of them were writing what they were told to write, more or less. And of course they had lots of leeway within that, but basically it’s a form of music that was paid for, much like the music industries today. It’s no longer a classical thing. Now it’s a pop, in its various forms: country western, rock and roll, whatever. It’s stuff that’s paid for. And just like classical music of old, it tends to lose any kind of political character or any of that whole aspect of the music tradition.

So I guess what I’m doing in another sense, because it’s political, it’s folk music in that real sort of traditional way, but much the same way that the Clash is folk music. It’s music that people wrote because they wanted to write it. In the case of the Clash they also became very popular, but it was authentic music created by people for other people, coming out of a grassroots tradition, the punk rock tradition. They wrote about love, but also about stuff that’s happening in the world. And that is the folk tradition right there. So in a way, me, or the Clash, or Public Enemy, or any number of others are basically in the mainstream of the folk tradition, as defined the way I was just defining it.