"When I graduated from Stonehill College, I went down to live and work at a soup kitchen in New York City," said King, 48. "While I was down there I would be cooking soup and serving in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked with the United Farm Workers on the grape boycott, which still goes on, and the lettuce boycott, and that was a real conversion in labor culture for me. "When they found out I was a singer they really used me pretty extensively to sing at rallies and on picket lines and at fund raisers. That's where I cut my teeth with music and politics."
King went on to sing in support of clerical and technical workers at Harvard and Yale Universities. He has worked for auto workers, coal miners and meat packers. He's been part of the Great Labor Arts Exchange, a nationwide organization. Most recently he helped obtain recognition from the American Federation of Musicians for Local 1000 of the North American Traveling Musicians Union, which he serves as secretary-treasurer.
His 10th album, Inside Out [Vaguely Reminiscent Sounds/ P.O. Box 6207/ Hamden, CT 06517] takes a personal look at people and issues. While it includes the labor related song "Bring Back the Eight Hour Day," it also contains a comical bluesy number about condom use in "Wrap That Rascal," deals with the issue of gays in the military in "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and includes a couple of antiwar songs.
"The War Has Been Coming Home," with its images of two tragedies - the bombing of a shelter in Iraq in which 800 civilians were killed and the Oklahoma City bombing - shows a society that has blurred the line between right and wrong. He points out the hypocrisy regarding violence. "I really believe what I say in that song. We're going to have the largest and best equipped military in the world," said King, who worked at a Massachusetts hospital when he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. "We're going to respond to violence and crime with the heaviest police response and the biggest prison system in the world. And, oh, by the way, we want everybody in the society to be nonviolent.
"The song comes out of a deep conviction that I have that we are a society that both celebrates and punishes violence, and that we can't have it both ways."
King draws his influences from folk singers like Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger. Paxton, he said, is inspiring because of his ability to pen topical and satirical songs. Seeger, meanwhile, introduced King to Paxton's music, but King has a different style, melding original, contemporary and traditional songs and music from other cultures. King treads in Paxton's and Seeger's footsteps, playing not only his own music, but that of other contemporary song writers. "As a traveling soloist I really rely on the community of musicians of my peers as a kind of support community, as companionship... By singing their songs I get kind of a comfort while traveling. Even though I'm alone, I feel like I'm traveling with these other good friends."
On Inside Out, King hits the issues on a more personal level, presenting the topics in character portraits so that the listener can picture how issues of our day affect them. That's particularly true in "If Jimmy Didn't Have to Go," an antiwar song, and in "The Place We Found for Michael," a song about homelessness.
King still gets the occasional heckler who disagrees with his points of view on issues, but often he performs where people already know his music. He's also learned how to balance his material. "If you don't alienate somebody, then you're not doing your job," he said. "But if you alienate everybody, then you're out of business. You've got your integrity, and you can stay home with it and pump gas."
"During the materialistic 80s, people were closed-minded to controversial and satirical material," King said. But things have changed. Despite the results of the past congressional election, people are less fooled today by political ideologies. "Now I think the veil has been ripped away," he said. "People realize more and more that we have some serious problems here. That they're not going to be solved by everybody trying to build up the biggest stock portfolio, and that there's not a lot to go around... People are realizing that the price we pay for having this small number of superstars with seven-figure incomes is that those of us who get left behind start losing hope and start to generate our own kind of chaos. We're at that point in our country where the smug, Republican, right wing majority is (seen as) less for people. This is kind of a foolhardy thing to say in the wake of the last election, but I think that that has peaked and is in decline."
Stephen Ide writes for The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, Mass. and several other publications. email: steve@folkie.riva.com.
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