Americans Who Tell the Truth
 David Rovics

David Rovics - ©2005Robert Shetterly-

David Rovics Biography

Singer/songwriter/activist  b. 1967

"If you knew that the earth was dying/  If they said this on the news…/ If you could see the ice caps melting…/ If you knew the bombs were falling/ If they showed them hit the ground/ If you could see the bodies flying/ If you could hear the sound…/ If every time we went to war/ To fight our evil foes/ they told you we were really fighting/ For the good of CEOs…/ If you knew that the whole planet / Depended on what you do…/ What if you knew?"

David Rovics was born in New York City but grew up in Connecticut. After a brief stint at Earlham College in Indiana, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he held a series of blue-collar jobs (he’s a member of the Industrial Workers of the World). By the early 1990s, he’d moved to Boston, where he hit the subways with an acoustic guitar and songs of protest.
He generally refers to himself as simply a “songwriter” or “musician,” but perhaps can be more fully described as an American acoustic protest singer.
 
Unlike most recording artists, Rovics makes all of his music available online for free and encourages videotapes of his concerts. When he performs live, he doesn’t use a set list, but lets the concert unfold on its own.
Rovics released his first all-original album in 1998, and followed it with several more, including the all-mp3-released “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” He released 21 albums between 1996 and 2011, including two for children.
 
Rovics’ lyrics offer listeners plenty to think about. He encourages the have-nots of the world to stick together in “Union Makes Us Strong”: During the Depression people fought and won back then/Now the battle's global and it was must be won again. He takes a step back in time for “Berkshire Hills” to Shay’s Rebellion: We said to hell with King John Adams/Of this farce we'd had our fill/And we set our sights on liberty/Here in the Berkshire hills. As a secular Jew, Rovics takes Israel to task in “Lebanon 2006”: A hundred thousand homes/Levelled to the ground/Every olive branch on offer/Burned where it was found/Every chance at dialogue/Rejected right on cue/If you’re gonna burn your bridges/You might as well bomb them too.
 
Rovics believes music can connect people in ways nothing else can: “We’re using music at marches and rallies to inspire the troops. And…to educate people about things that are happening, and to talk about it in a way that hopefully might be more memorable than a speech… There’s something about music that makes people feel optimistic,” he says.
 
To anyone who’d like to do what he does, he says, “Keep writing. Keep learning. Be open to criticism from yourself or others on music or politics. Never delude yourself into thinking you're original. Keep listening to music and learning songs other people wrote. Keep your heart open. See the world. Put yourself in other peoples' shoes regularly...”
 
Rovics lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter. His writes for CounterPunch and Truthout. Hundreds of his songs are available for free download at soundclick.com; his own website can be viewed at davidrovics.com.
 
 

Next Portrait
Previous Portrait

it's hard to pin down that moment when the thin veil of 'freedom,
justice and the american way' was removed, and i was faced with the
stark reality that our society is fundamentally flawed, unjust,
undemocratic, not free in any reasonable sense of the word.  there
were many seminal moments for me in this process of learning about how
things really work in america, and thinking about how they need to
work differently.  certainly one of the earliest ones was the partial
core meltdown at the three mile island nuclear plant in pennsylvania.
soon after that disaster i went to a camp in a small town with a
nuclear reactor in it -- rowe camp in rowe, massachusetts.  there i
met people from the community who were active in the movement to shut
down these leaky, structurally unsound reactors.  a few years later
the plant was shut down, and the antinuclear movement played an
important role in that happening.  this was certainly a good early
lesson in the power that a social movement can play in shaping society
for the better.
---- David Rovics
Zinn Education Project offers this lesson and additional resources related to Irish American soldiers in the Mexican War and David Rovic's song "St. Patrick's Batalion." What an incredibly important story in our history of soldiers choosing to fight with the Mexican soldiers- and the use of song to help students understand the story is a great accompaniment to the chapter from an out of print book and the work from Rethinking Schools that can be downloaded here as a PDF.

http://zinnedproject.org/posts/7166