home bio press tour dates
email David

Kerrville New Folk award winner (1986), landslide top vote-getter at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival's "Most Wanted Showcase" (1996), and NAIRD INDIE nominee - Digging Through My Closet, singer/songwriter album of the year (1994), DAVID ROTH has often been cited for his entertaining stage presence, accomplished musicianship, and powerful singing and subject matter.

Since emerging from a nationwide field of several hundred songwriters to open the 1987 Kerrville (TX) Folk Festival as its New Folk winner, David has won accolades for his performances, workshops, writing, and recordings. In addition to singing "Earth" at the 40th Anniversary of the United Nations, David's "Rising in Love" was performed at the 100th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall in 1991. "Manuel Garcia" (based on the true story of one man's battle with cancer) and "Nine Gold Medals" (which Tom Paxton says is "one of the best songs I've heard in the last 20 years") both appear in the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen.

David's song "A Little Something More" appears in Barbara Glanz's business best-seller CARE Packages for the Workplace (McGraw-Hill). Her sequel, "Care Packages for the Home" (Andrews-McMeel) includes seven of David's songs, one at the end of each chapter.

In addition to performing at music festivals, clubs and venues across the U.S. and Canada, David leads singing, songwriting, and performance workshops and is a presenter and emcee at a wide variety of conferences and retreats. He has been the artist-in-residence for several years at New York's Omega Institute, one of the country's leading adult education centers, and has recorded six albums of his work.

My first job was as a busboy at Arlington Park Racetrack on Saturdays when I was 13 years old. Worked there every summer through high school (Niles West in Skokie, where my music teacher was Frank Winkler, the great jazz pianist and former touring keyboardist for Peggy Lee and Sammy Davis Jr.). He taught me respect for music in all its forms, and I still have his picture taped on one of my notebooks. Went downtown to Wabash Street with my best friend when I was a senior and paid a couple hundred bucks (a lot of money then) for a new Gibson B-25 guitar with a sunburst top. The first lick I taught myself was "Daytripper" by the Beatles. The first song I labored to learn was "April Come She Will" by Simon & Garfunkel.

I continued at the University of Illinois sometime thereafter, the shadows of Steve Goodman and Dan Fogelberg still on the walls at the Red Herring Coffeehouse in Urbana where I first began to pull that guitar out of its case in public. My pal Judd and I came up with the concept of doing "Duet for Two Tennis Rackets" at their Fall Folk Festival one year, and my album collection contained discs by Goodman, Prine, Fogelberg, Shel Silverstein, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Alan Sherman, Tony Bennett and Mel Torme´. I'd probably also "borrowed" a Peter, Paul & Mary disk or two from my sister on occasion, but passed on Peter & Gordon and Chad & Jeremy. Wrote my first song on Valentine's Day in 1974, "Ode to Harmony Bill". Don't ever ask me to play it, and my titles are getting better these days.

Upon graduation (a degree in Radio/TV Communications) I took a job as an advertising copywriter at a small agency in Anchorage, Alaska. I was half of the creative department (2 people). I wrote, he drew. I remember being thrilled at the very idea that I could be paid money to write words, and I used to stay late just because I enjoyed writing with no one else around. My advertising career lasted exactly five months when I lost my interest (which I have since wondered how I ever gained in the first place) and resigned.

Twenty three years old, and over to Moby Dick's Lounge on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage, where I'd heard that they were looking for someone to play music during Happy Hour "because Kitty was leaving". I walked in and borrowed "Kitty's" electric guitar and played the first two verses of "Part of the Plan" by Dan Fogelberg and got my first professional music job, fifteen bucks an hour, 4-6 PM Mondays thru Thursdays. I stayed in Alaska for a total of three years and after 3 months of happy hours went on to work as: a corrections counselor for the Department of Health and Social Services; an actor for the Alaska Repertory Theatre; and front man for a country-rock and bluegrass band called "Kicks". Backtracking just a tad, while still in college in Illinois, my friend Jim and I went and saw the movie "The Man Who Would Be King" based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling. We were inspired that very night to have a big travel adventure one day, and when we were 26 years old, I left Alaska, Jim took leave of his law practice in Chicago, and we procured one-way tickets from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia. I bought another guitar for this trip and it not only served to introduce us to free hotel rooms, new friends, meals, and extra money at all the right times along the way, but even survived getting run over by a car while we hitch-hiked on the South Island of New Zealand.

So I traveled from Los Angeles to New York City the hard way (going west) and ended up in the center of the universe in the Spring of 1980. I quickly realized that playing covers wasn't gonna cut it any more if I wanted to be serious about doing more music. Went down to Greenwich Village one Monday night, stumbled into Folk City and the Cornelia Street Cafe to meet the singer songwriters of the day...Jack Hardy, Suzanne Vega, David Massengill, Cliff Eberhardt, Rod MacDonald, Josh Joffen, and later on, Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, and anybody else who happened to be passing through New York City who knew about these very special collocations (that's a word I found in the Thesaurus under "gatherings").

I was hooked, intimidated, intrigued, and addicted, and an obvious neophyte, but the beauty there was the rule that everyone who showed up at these Monday night things could only play a "work in progress". We weren't there to parade our greatest hits or polished jewels, but rather the rawest and most recent writing that anyone was willing to put out in front of the group. Cheaper than college, and more to the point. My "visit" to New York City lasted almost ten years, and my Monday nights of open mikes and all night-cafe´s proved to be a fertile songwriting workplace. Had a lot of part time jobs during this time, including wearing a sandwich sign on Broadway (lesson in humility), cutting leather in a factory, doing office temp work, waiting tables, and later on working as an audio engineer at United Nations Radio and ABC-TV.

I entered the Kerrville Folk Festival's annual songwriting contest in Texas in 1985 and got as far as making the list of forty finalists. Came back from that festival and thought about what I had learned by hearing and meeting people like Chuck Pyle, Steve Gillette, Pierce Pettis, Jon Ims, Mike Williams, and LJ Booth for the first time, then entered again the next year and got the big enchilada - selection to open the mainstage the following year. Someone holding up a walkman tape recorder in the audience during the contest gave me what turned out to be the demo tape that I used to get bookings for almost two years.

Towards the end of my time in NYC I also met a man named Mark Tucker who had a business called Awakening Heart Productions. He'd been traveling all around the country for years showing inspirational multi-media programs to audiences that included the U.S. Congress, the Pentagon, National Geographic, Kodak, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, countless conferences and retreats, and he'd heard a couple of my songs. Invited me on a Florida tour where we ended up performing in 30 cities in 31 days, and here I'd found another audience in addition to mainstream folk fans. The comfort I developed in front of these wide and diverse groups got me more work as a musician and presenter at a variety of conferences, symposiums, workshop centers, retreats, and special events of all kinds, and that's what I've been doing with my little songs since 1988 as a full-time folk singer, an oxymoron if there ever was one. I've since lived a couple years in Los Angeles, and since 1992 in Seattle, coffee capital of the known universe, and gateway to a most beautiful corner of our country.

Career highlights not mentioned above include:

• Singing 2 national anthems for the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls
• Landslide (their adjective) top vote-getter in the 1996 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival's "Most Wanted" showcase from a nationwide field of several hundred performers
• Inclusion in the international best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul books, as well as songs in books by Gerry Jampolsky, Barbara Glanz, Alan Cohen, and Joan Baker-Gonzalez
• Andrea Marcovicci singing one of my songs ("Rising in Love") at the 100th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall
• Performing "Earth" at the 40th Anniversary of the United Nations
• Another of my songs "Spacesuits" is being performed by Noel Stookey on the current Peter, Paul, & Mary tour
• Several summers as artist in residence at NY's Omega Institute
• Opening for Dr. Maya Angelou, fall '98 at the "Healing the Whole Self" conference in Fort Lauderdale, FL
• 1994 world premier of original one-man play "The Gripes of Roth" at the Nomad Theater in Boulder, CO

Concerts
A mainstage performer at many festivals, clubs, concert halls, coffeehouses, and venues across the U.S. and Canada, David has performed for audiences ranging from 50 to 5,000.

Conferences
(from corporate to eclectic) engage David as emcee, musician, presenter, and/or stress reduction facilitator. Sponsors include psychotherapists, teachers, universities, healthcare professionals, corporations, churches, and social service agencies. He also teams up with motivational speaker Barbara Glanz (see above) in half and full-day trainings on regenerating spirit in the workplace.

Workshops
No Wrong Notes, Singing for Shy People, Instant Angelic Choir, Songwriting, and Stage Absence to Stage Presence are interactive, empowering, playful, and hands-on. He has been the musician-in-residence at New York's Omega Institute for several summers and teaches across the U.S. and Canada.

One-Man Show
The Gripes of Roth saw its theatrical world premiere in Boulder, CO in December of 1994. . . an evening of songs, stories, rantings and ravings about life on earth, it's struggles and triumphs, absurdities and possibilities.

There are two ways to purchase any of the CDs on this site. 1) Just write down the names or stock numbers of the items you are interested. When you have chosen your items, go to Rediscover Music and type them into the "Search" field. 2) Click on the "Order Now" link next to the item you want to buy. This link will take you directly to that item at our Rediscover Music site. Once there, click "buy" to put the item into your shopping cart. If you would like to order more items, use your browser's "Back" button to come back here and continue browsing, or use the links to the left of the screen to see more items. You will be able to browse through all our available titles and view the song listings, too!