I kept seeing the question on social media: “Where are all the protest folk singers?” Where? Everywhere. What kind of a question is this?

It’s heartening that someone felt a need for music to unify our times, but folks…look around you! We’ve been broken since COVID made us stay inside but #BlackLivesMatter  asked us to take to the streets in N95 masks with signs that shouted louder than our voices. Our communities changed, permanently.

These days we spend more time connecting online or by text than we do in coffee houses and small venues. Songwriters are handing out QR codes instead of cassette tapes, directing us to Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or other streaming platforms to hear them. The little neighborhood clubs are hurting. And the times, they are a-changin’.

Finally we’re finding our voices, each other’s voices. The internet is flooded with stories of outrage, communities attacked by our own government’s actions.

We’re in the thick of it all right now. The revolution is being televised. The folk singers are hard at work.

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Emmett Doyle (ED) lives in Minneapolis near the Third Precinct. I interviewed him over Zoom on February 6, 2025.

ED: I’ve got to say I’ve never seen the city as organized as it is right now in terms of just grassroots everything. It’s almost impossible to keep track of all the different work that people are doing.

There’s the people who are going around bringing food to people’s homes, doing laundry for people who can’t leave because they’re afraid of getting kidnapped. There’s a crew of carpenters going around fixing doors that have been kicked in by ICE agents. There’s multiple different tow truck companies that are towing people’s cars for free after they’re abducted, and there’s  an ongoing 24-7 protest outside the Whipple building for weeks, as the building gets more and more fortified. I think we’re kind of at a turning point right now. I think we’ll see what happens.

Within these last couple weeks, it’s just been three or four times the density of protest songs in any given night, to the point that a lot of times if someone doesn’t have a protest song, they’ll be apologetic about it. “Hey, I don’t really have anything to say musically right now, but Fuck ICE – ICE Out. Anyway, I wrote the song about my girlfriend and I really love her…”

And it’s like, that’s fine, dude. You can sing that song, too. We need Love.

The ideology is that you can only have solidarity with people who share the same culture as you. But the problem is that my hometown is like 10% Somali. Those are my neighbors, and they have been since I was a very small child. We’ve always had Hmong people and Native people and Latino people living alongside us; that’s not threatening to us, and we don’t consider them to be part of a separate culture.

This is our town, this is our culture. I think everyone here understands the federal occupation as an outside force that’s attacking us and our neighbors, even if they were born in Mogadishu or in the mountains in Southeast Asia somewhere. That’s our community.

deb: I think I’m hearing from you, which I think is great, that your definition of culture is multicultural.

ED: Yeah. As a musician, it really can’t be anything else. We as folk musicians understand how our folk/roots blend and change over time. We know that, from an ethnomusicological standpoint, all of our folk music is a mixing of different traditions from all the world.

Read more about the Minneapolis Protest Scene here: Emmett Doyle’s Minneapolis

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Federal government notwithstanding, none of this is new in America. From the constitutional 3/5 Compromise to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into current times, our government has maintained clear lines on how much a citizen anyone is allowed to be. I wanted to know what today’s protest music looks like to musicians born and raised outside the multigenerational bubble of gentrification.

Through my volunteer work with FAR-West, I’ve made some  connections to the Folk world. Todd Lawrence, the secret identity of performer Milo Binder, splits his time between Portland and Los Angeles. He suggested I talk to Freddy Trujillo.

Freddy Trujillo (FT) tells me he’s a Chicano – L.A. California-born of Mexican descent. He doesn’t consider himself very good at community organizing; he just sings his songs. He told me he doesn’t have an immigrant experience, but plenty to say about being treated like one.

FT: That’s an interesting statement you made: Where are the protest singers? That worked in the ’60s. That worked in eras that I’m very influenced by. But I think because of streaming, we’re all in our own radio station. There are people out there, but it’s really hard to get people to listen to anything; everyone’s attention spans are pretty short. And I don’t know, there’s that one kid that’s gone kind of viral. I forget his name, that redhead kid.

deb: Oh, Jesse Wells.

FT: Yeah, yeah. I mean, he’s been saying his shit and gone viral, but he’s also just kind of really good at doing reels. He’s made a thing for himself, so he’s really relevant. I don’t know, but somebody like me, I’m more known as a bass player who plays for other people; I just happen to make these records.

But in reality, I’m more American than most because my family history can trace all the way back to a Spaniard and Native American in the state of California, even before it belonged to Mexico. Then it got purchased for $15 million with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Those are the things that I’ve been empowered with through education, and just started singing about, but no one seemed to be listening.

My protest often is having to remind people of that history of the border: I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me. – Freddy Trujillo

FT: I’m seeing kind of a cultural difference in the way all of this is being approached. I think it’s because the white community being attacked is new, whereas the indigenous or Latino community has been dealing with it since forever.

deb: I see that, too. It’s not new, right?

FT: There’s a thing I saw in Germany, if I can find it, something like: “to defeat racism is white people’s responsibility.” It was in an area of Hamburg where I played; there was a bunch of messages like that.

deb: How much of what you do is protest and how much of it is just telling your personal story in your songs? Are those things the same thing?

FT: They’re the same thing. I mean, since I was a kid, I grew up in a really conservative town. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Simi Valley. It’s north of LA. It’s where all the LAPD lived. During the Rodney King trials, you got to remember, that’s the first time they ever caught police on camera. Now everybody has a camera, but then it was a huge moment.

Simi Valley’s got a weird dark history. It’s where Manson family was. There was a lot of movie sets there, but we used to have freedom. And we had horses. We had motorcycles. My sisters and I, we could go anywhere. We didn’t really realize we were poor in the 70s. Then all of a sudden the 80s came along and everything was a bust because they were making track housing. We weren’t allowed to be there anymore.

Growing up, it was this oppression that just happened to me. I got used to people acting like I wasn’t worthy or whatever. So I guess to answer your question: I got empowered with education.

I have a song called, “I Never Threw a Shadow at It.” I called the police because somebody was stealing my car. They end up arresting me, handcuffing me, sitting me on the curb. That was a month before the Rodney King thing.

I wasn’t even living in Simi Valley. At that point, I had money from a record deal and I was living in Woodland Hills. They were just not convinced that I belonged in that neighborhood.

I’m old enough to remember discrimination. I remember when Mexican food trucks were called “roach coaches” but now everybody has a food truck. You’d go to East L.A. and there was roosters rolling down the alley and whatever. Now everybody has their chickens.

I wrote “Assimilation Blues” about three generations. I have one grandpa that’s from Michoacán. The rest of my grandparents are indigenous or predate even belonging to Mexico. So the three generations: first, the grandparents telling their kids not to speak Spanish because they don’t want them to experience what they (the grandparents) did.

The next generation would be my parents, who feel like they’re in between something. “It’s an empty feeling,” I say in that verse.

Then my generation, the grandkids: more assimilated. Seeing their parents work so hard, having to take it in stride. Some may drop out of school, have to turn to crime, while some get a scholarship, ironically surrounded by privileged American kids who speak better Spanish than they ever did.

And that to me was like a form of white privilege. Suddenly I see these younger kids and it hit me hard. So these are protest things:  let’s not keep making these mistakes.

For me, music is a healing process. So I’m progressing; trying to hope my stories empower other Mexican Americans to understand. It’s one person at a time. I mean, I’ll just do this shit anyway.

I’m motivated by what’s going on. My new record coming out in September has a bird theme.  I couldn’t shake the fucking Chicano thing even in that record.

There’s a song called “Common Loon” about a Chicano soul singer. He didn’t speak Spanish; he ended up moving to Minneapolis with a girl he met. He thought he would be unique there but he’s just singing the blues. And he just ends up being – I use metaphor of common loon – but he ends up down the road being an alcoholic and homeless. But all in that song, I still talk about Chicano: the life of a Chicano is neither here nor there. You know what I mean? I can’t shake the Chicano narrative sometimes. It’s funny.

“I thought I would be the one to finally break some chains
but I’m breaking down and old wounds remain.
The life of a Chicano is a double life for sure
a life of neither here nor there, and they want you to be pure.“

There’s nothing more authentic than being in this colored skin and having situations like we’re about to go in again, or not going in again. I’m lucky I live in Portland, Oregon. We put up the good fight here.

Follow Freddy on Instagram @freddytrujillo. and on Youtube. Take a moment to check out his music at freddytrujillo.com. It’s a smooth ride with a few lessons to be picked up in the conversation. Find something you like, and tell your friends.

Our Folk history gets chunked until a name like Woody Guthrie or a location like Laurel Canyon unfolds a glittering landscape we don’t need to enunciate. The latest Bob Dylan movie is still fresh in the public’s mind, along with those iconic names: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie. I’m fortunate to know people who knew the people, get a little glimpse backstage. As we all suspect, Hollywood cleans it up nice. There was a lot left out.

We can just move on down the conversation. But true Folk, music of the people, is having its conversation where the people live.

I found Tall Paul, Ojibwe hiphop artist, in Minnesota. Here feels like a good moment to remind everyone that folk is music of the people, for the people, which in my eyes includes rap/hiphop, jazz, and punk music. Tall Paul has used his vehicle to update real American history in projects like The Story of Jim Thorpe.

Tall Paul (TP): I think of a song that I have called ‘Pieceful Revolution.’ A lot of people in the world have been dealing with what many people are now dealing with for the first time. You don’t have to imagine it anymore, what other countries are going through, because we’re not safe in our own neighborhoods. They’re trying to desensitize us to that fact and normalize it. On two, three different occasions in the past five, six years in Minnesota, we’ve seen military vehicles going through our streets, which is kind of surreal. But I’ll admit, it is becoming a little bit desensitized even in my own psyche.

Growing used to it, and that’s not good.

deb: No, it’s not.

TP: So yeah, I talk about a lot of these things in my music. I’m not somebody who raps only about this stuff, but it is a part of who I am and how I think. I’ll definitely express my thoughts on many of these things that have been going on. As I mentioned to you in email, I wrote and recorded a new song that is specifically about the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and how it’s impacted native communities here.

deb: It seems like trust has been having to be built very quickly where usually it takes a lifetime. It seems like there’s a lot of mistrust that might have to be undone also.

TP:  Because there’s a long history of the US (government) infiltrating movements and people are aware of that. With how sudden this whole situation was, and how sudden the organizing had to happen, I’m sure that’s on the back of people’s minds at the very least. There are entire channels of communication in which they warn before you join them, like: “Hey, this is unvetted, so move with that information in mind. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t you wouldn’t want read back to you in the courts; be careful.”

Learn more about Tall Paul in the full interview: Tall Paul: Ojibwe, Rapper, Resister as Life

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Seattle, Washington, became known as a resistance hotbed in 2020 with the confluence of rising costs of living, COVID isolation mandates, and the murder of George Floyd. Mainstream media made sure we all knew about the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. More recently, the current regime tried to leverage that history, claiming that Antifa was a real™ terrorist organization, alive and well in Seattle.

Carmaig de Forest (CdF) spells his band name, CARMAIG↯GEDDON, with a symbol that vexingly delights graphic designers. Carmaig cut his teeth on Punk – further evidence that Punk is Folk when you see him with his ukulele. But this persona has evolved along with the song “Crack’s No Worse Than a Fascist Threat” from his album I Shall Be Released (1987.)

I wanted to talk about this song, how it will apparently always be an anthem for our times, no matter what times may be. Here’s a lesson in songwriting for you.

CdF: There’s three songs on that LP that have a political message. In order of when I wrote them, the first one is “Big Business,” where I sing “Big business is none of your business.” It’s not a protest song, per se.

me: I really like that concept. It’s social commentary.

CdF: Yes, but in the same vein as the bulk of my early songs, for the most part, post-adolescent, basically angry love songs.

me: Yeah, a friend of mine once told me everything I write is love poetry.

CdF: Well, I mean, you could make the argument that all songs are love songs, or that all songs are protest songs. I was really taken with Elvis Costello’s musical sensibilities, his vicious word play, and his angry disillusionment with romance in particular and the world in general. “Big Business” was one of those early songs. You’ll hear a lot of those Costelloisms in there.

A little later I wrote “Hey Judas.” I wasn’t setting out to write a political song at all, but I had the line, “Hey, Judas, what you doing down here?” It just started unfolding  like the flip side of Abraham, Martin, and John – with people in hell. There’s no metaphor. There’s no mincing words. It’s like a total finger pointing “You did this and you did that and I wish you were dead and go to hell.”

me: That’s very punk.

CdF: It was maybe another year later – that I wrote the third blatantly political song. “Crack’s No Worse Than the Fascist Threat.”  It was just one of those moments of inspiration. I think I was getting worked up over something I was hearing on the radio and the line, “Crack’s no worse than the fascist threat” came into my head. It made me think of a political cartoon I’d seen where Uncle Sam was holding out a urine specimen bottle; and underneath it said, “Just say no.”

Fast forward to 2005 – having had a satisfying but never lucrative career, I began a long leave of absence to be the at-home caregiver for our children. I stopped touring, performing, even writing for a good twelve years. I wasn’t thinking about performing again until Pat Thomas got Omnivore Recordings involved in reissuing that first album. That reawakened my dormant inner folk-punk, kind of brought me back to that era where somehow I was under the illusion that I could be a rockstar.

And of course, I mean, it’s only an illusion if it doesn’t work out.

me: That’s a good line. But I want you to tell me, as much as you remember, about the moment you realized that song needed to be reinvented while we all live in a Fascist state. What was the “dammit I’m doing it” moment?”

CdF: The re-release came out at the end of 2017. That summer, 2018, I did a show with my old band in San Francisco. At the Make-Out Room show we performed “Crack…” in its original form, through to the final “just say no!!” when we all stopped except the drummer. Then, over the drummer’s groove, I talked about how the encroachment of fascism had gotten a lot worse, at which point I and my back-up singers sang “Ryan, Trump, McConnell, Pence is the fascist threat we’re up against.” I kept the verse I’d written: “unarmed black men shot by cops in the name of law and order'”  – then something about kids being caged at the border, and a third line, “[blah blah blah blah] plutocratic new world order” then the “Just say no!” refrain to end the song for real. And then it was back to Seattle and my responsibilities at home.

deb: …and then we elected Trump again.

CdF: Not yet. That was 2018 — we’re still in the middle of Trump’s first term. I had further tweaked the “Cracks No…” coda. Now as the main song ended while the drums still played, I testified with a little tirade about how when I wrote that song, I thought my line “World War II’s not over yet” was kind of clever; but now the fascists were right in our back yard.

And then I said: “What I realized now realize is it’s the Civil War that’s not over yet.” So to the tune of the chorus, I went, “The Civil War’s not over yet / It’s a White Supremacist Suprem’cist fascist threat.”

And then the pandemic hit. So we started meeting every Wednesday on Zoom. I really liked that; it kind of got me back in touch with my old self and I started writing again. Coming out of the pandemic, I met Amy Zoe – we hit it off right away I met Amy Zoe – we hit it off right away and we decided to create a two-piece band which became CARMAIG↯GEDDON.

CARMAIG↯GEDDON launched in 2023. We played Folklife that year. I said to Amy, “Well, we’ve got to figure out a way to do “Crack’s No Worse Than the Fascist Threat.”

deb: …so there wasn’t a moment, but a decade-long evolution.

CdF: Sometime last year, after Trump took office with all his Day One executive orders, I realized that touching on the current state as a coda just didn’t cut it anymore. I just had to write new lyrics, which I did in my hotel room at FAR-West. That evening “We Now Live In a Fascist State” had its debut in a private showcase. I started playing it at open mics in Seattle, constantly updating it as more horrific shit kept happening — Minnesota, Venezuela. Then came the new year and the shitshow in Iran, so more changes for our February show at Egan’s Ballard Jam House.

Follow Carmaig de Forest on Facebook, Instagram, or at Bandcamp to keep abreast of what he’s up to (and how the song changes.) Also subscribe to the CARMAIG↯GEDDON YouTube channel and go down the Carmaig rabbit hole.

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Casey Neill (CN) gave a workshop at the 2025 FAR-West Annual Music Conference titled Memory Against Forgetting – songwriting and activism. The workshop explored songwriting as a tool for activism, and protest as inspiration. Among other accomplishments, Casey’s recorded three acoustic albums for the Appleseed label and contributed tracks to their Pete Seeger Tribute along with Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, and Bonnie Raitt. He’s performed with Seeger, The Indigo Girls, and in 2017 was a part of the Newport Folk Fest ‘Speak Out’ band. He’s also been inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.

CN: I’d come from activism. I was a musician. I tried to write songs, but …  maybe it was something I was thinking I could do, but I was an environmental activist in the early ’90s. I was living in Olympia, Washington, and part of a lot of efforts to save ancient forests up and down the coast. Then I met a whole bunch of people who were musicians writing songs about it. I started doing that. I started playing around campfires; people liked the songs.

Through the environmental movement, I had met Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. And then I ended up working with Pete Seeger and playing with him a fair amount. I’d come from the punk rock world, but was always interested in acoustic music and especially interested in the places where those two things meet.

deb: I always say punk is folk.

CN: I think it’s more the ethos of it. It’s like punk sort of began as something that wasn’t even supposed to be a music genre. It was more like a way of seeing the world. And I think it’s very in line with elements of the folk world.

I think that a lot of traditional stuff – songs that have come from the Irish tradition or Appalachia or Union songs or something like the Midnight Special, like prison songs – those are from direct lived experience.

deb: Yeah, they feel distant to us, like old classics we can learn now, but those stories were real – in real time – when they were written. That’s a very good point.

CN: I talked about this in my thing in my workshop, too. I ended up going back for a lot of that music in life, but the music I grew up with as a teenager was stuff like the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman, Sinead O’Connor and Billy Bragg, people that all had elements of punk to them, but are really all acoustic songwriters. That was what sort of brought me into it.

So when people are like, “Oh, this is a ’60s thing” – when has it ever gone away?

(This video for “Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations” is age-restricted, so you have to click here to see it on YouTube. Please do, and enjoy Casey Neill’s music set to actual protest footage.) 

CN: We’re not having one conversation anymore. We’re having a thousand different conversations. And so how do you – even in the little niches of the folk world, in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’50s, whatever – even if it was a small little corner of the conversation, it was a part of the conversation. And now in the sea of the internet, it’s just more.  Are you just creating more noise?

deb: I feel like everybody’s just kind of still holding back and not knowing what to do. I think if we could figure out how to hand them something and say, “Here, do this,” a lot of people would.

CN: What I love about Evan Greer‘s video and what I think I’m hearing from you is that we’re out there in the world with each other, having this human experience. With all this humanity, we are expressing this together.

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Follow Casey Neill on Facebook and learn more about his projects here: caseyneill.com or join his substack, Memory Against Forgetting.

So what can we hand people to help them come together?

Todd Lawrence (Milo Binder) and Neal Weiss (fuzzyville), as Neal states: “are constantly pondering ways to create musical gatherings that exist beyond the typical gig and all of its trappings. Many big-brained ideas remain in concept only, but one idea that has taken root is the multi-artist event for a just cause.”

On February 27, 2025 they organized “PDX for LA: Songs of LA to Benefit Fire Relief,” to raise money in the wake of the devastating fires of January 2025. Several of the established musicians they enlisted for those events are on board for “This Is Not a Drill! Protest Music for Authoritarian Times” – names like Freddy Trujillo, Jason Luckett, and Carmaig de Forest, among Milo, fuzzyville, and others.

The theme was (again, as Neal puts it) “born out of the very real sense of how fucked up the world is right now. It hopefully answers the question: What can we do about it?”

Musicians playing protest music, be they originals or covers, while raising money for select organizations, seems to be a means to counter the existential threats around us and provide for another evening of community through music. It connects how we feel to what we do and allows us to activate around it. – fuzzyville (Neal Weiss)

“This Is Not a Drill!” will take place on Sunday, April 26 in Portland, OR  at Hawthorne Hideaway, and Monday, April 27 Culver City, CA at Village Well Books & Coffee. Both venues are independently owned, community-based spots and “copacetic partners.” Both venues have history with Milo and fuzzyville.

deb: How did you organize – what were specific steps?

Neal Weiss (fuzzyville) (NW(fv)): The work is like any other production: lots of outreach, emails, texts and phone calls, scribbled notes and random thoughts. Wash, rinse, repeat. Honestly, the music community we call our own in both LA and Portland is filled with so many lovely, talented people that the lineups themselves came together fairly easily. The only people who said no did so due to scheduling conflicts.

deb: Will Liberty Strikes be joining in?

NW(fv): Yes. We can’t wait to see her perform.

deb: How can people see these shows? Are there tickets? Website?

NW(fv): Portland – the show is free with donations encouraged to benefit the Interfaith Movement Immigrant Justice. No advanced nothing. Just show up, with love.

Los Angeles – the show is $10, with all ticket sales going to the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. Village Well event link to come. We are exploring the ability to live stream.

So what can we do? What can somebody put in our hands?

Start here: SingingResistance is a list of resources that include a downloadable Toolkit, Community Gathering Guide, songbook, and training series accessible via Zoom. Register for Songleading in the Streets April 8th 7-8:30 Central time or Authoritarianism, White Supremacy, and Fighting Back Through Song April 9the 6-8pm Central time.

Learn more about this excellent organization in this article by Katy Maehl: Connect With the Singing Resistance.

Oh yeah: Release the files, Charge, and Prosecute!

(Thanks to two-time Grammy winners Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer for this video)

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debora Ewing writes, paints, and screams at the stars because the world is still screwed up. She improves what she can withmusic collaboration, peer-review atConsilience Poetry Journal, or designing & editing books forIgneus Press. Follow @DebsValidation onX andInstagram. Read her self-distractions atFolkWorks.org andJerryJazzMusician.com.