I’m pretty sure Mon Rovîa was joking when he told me he was ‘ageless’ but, honestly, I kind of believe it. He didn’t seem to fit into the overpriced Camden café we met up in last month, just a couple of hours ahead of his performance at KOKO. The throngs of tourists felt totally incompatible with a man who, throughout our conversation, seemed intent of referring to ‘society’ as ‘soil’; likewise, the Clean Bandit megamix blaring above us was antithetical to his music, which probably has more in common with artists of the 1800s than it does today. Mon Rovîa appears to be from a different time.

But, of course, Mon Rovîa is of this world. He makes Appalachian folk music that pays homage to the storied mountain range overlooking his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s a working-class musical tradition that soundtracked Mon Rovîa’s childhood spent playing amid the foothills of Appalachia, but it wasn’t until COVID hit that he decided to pick up a ukulele for himself; prior to then, his work leaned far closer to hip hop.

“There was a time where rap had taken over and, if you were African American or Black in some way, you almost felt like you needed to do that type of music,” he explains of his teenage years spent listening to Kendrick Lamar and Lil Baby. “I think COVID made the soil really ripe for singer-songwriters to come back. People had gone through this disastrous event alone with themselves, having to battle mental health, and counseling all of a sudden becomes more accepted. Around that time, I picked up the ukulele and it felt like the soil was definitely more ready to hear about healing.”

You see, there’s a surprising amount of overlap between rap and folk music. Both are dedicated to telling stories from the bottom, and both have shared histories in African-American communities. However, the two traditions differ drastically in the ways in which they choose to tell these stories – where hip hop is cemented in the urban environment and the (drum) machines that come with it, folk appeals to timeless references in the natural landscape, set to instruments that have been played for hundreds of years.

Mon Rovîa describes a turning point taking place during COVID, using the recent success of Grammy-award-winning Canadian folk artist Noah Kahan as an example of people yearning for the healing power of nature. Indeed, more widely, there has been a proliferation of contemporary hip hop and pop artists returning to more timeless soundscapes in the past year – rapper-turned-country singer Shaboozey's “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was the single of 2024, while Beyoncé went full country on Cowboy Carter. Just last week, underground art rap pioneer DJ Lucas embarked on a trip down the Appalachian trail, eliciting the stark interchangeability of rap and folk lyrics as he went.

Even among these artists, however, Mon Rovîa’s story is particularly unique. Born in Monrovia, Liberia (name origin: check) into a civil war that tragically took his mother’s life, Mon Rovîa was brought to the United States by Christian missionaries as a child, eventually settling with an adopted family in the Appalachian foothills he now calls home. The experience underscores the soul-searching lyrics he writes today, and has also led him to develop a keen eye for injustice in this world.

“I spend a lot of time learning about the Civil Rights movement and African Americans of that time, because a lot of the present day mirrors the past,” says Mon Rôvia, having recently teased new single “Heavy Foot” which criticises US politicians’ refusal to acknowledge the ongoing Palestinian genocide with the energy of the Civil Rights protest anthems of years gone by. “I want to be an artist that is remembered in that vein – someone that said something in times when nobody said anything, that went out when everybody stayed in.” Mon Rovîa may have arrived here from a different time, but he brings with him lessons that we never should have forgotten.

Below, we speak to ‘ageless’ Appalachian folk artist Mon Rovîa about his unique entry into the genre, his favourite stories, and the legacy he’d like to leave behind.

Hey Mon Rovîa! What’s Chattanooga like?

Mon Rovîa: It’s a really, really beautiful place. We have a lot of rivers and trees and forests, but we just don’t have the culture like you guys, who have a lot of different ethnicities. But I’ll never leave it. We have a great community. It’s very outdoorsy, and it’s a very slow pace [of life]. I don’t really like big cities and things like that.

With the name Appalachian folk, your music is pretty embedded in the region too, right?

Mon Rovîa: Yeah, you know, I live right there, in those foothills of Appalachia. At first, I didn’t really look at the music at all but, learning more of the history and seeing the ties of West Africa to that area, it started to make sense. It’s like I’ve been channelling this unknown thing for a while.]

Interesting, what’s the link between West Africa and Appalachian folk?

Mon Rovîa: So, these Africans came over in the slave trade and the ones that would escape would go into the mountains and mix with the Irish and Scottish people that also were trying to find their own way out there, and their instruments mixed together. It’s been cool to see that history that lingers, and it’s kind of gotten lost by the wayside. Their songs got left in the dust because they didn’t have the means to be at the forefront of things.

Did it feel like everything just clicked when you started making that sort of music?

Mon Rovîa: Yeah, I always loved reading and writing poetry. One reason I love folk music is that their voices were unique – I didn’t sing for a long time because people would tell me that my vocals were ‘unique’, too. They wouldn’t say it was good [laughs]. A normal hip-hop or pop person had a clean vocal, and I wasn’t like that. So, I found a lot of comfort listening to different sounding vocals in folk music. It was more poetic in form, where you had to sit and listen to the lyrics over and over again to understand them.

You know, I read something by Anaïs Nin the other day. She says: ‘I try to fit into the world. I starve.’ That’s what I was doing. I was trying to fit into a different body, a different experience, and starving myself of the true nutrients and the true way I could go about my life. Eventually I just stopped trying to do that and I was like, ‘I’m gonna go back to what I love, just writing on the ukulele.’

I’m curious about the accent you added to Monrovia [the Liberian capital]. 

Mon Rovîa: That’s just to differentiate it from the actual city. When people were looking up Monrovia, and it was just Monrovia [the city], you see the problem… Maybe one day I’ll outgrow my city, but I hope not, because that place needs to be known. I wanted to always have this journey not be about me, for it to be about the people whose stories are never told, the history that gets cast aside. It keeps me grounded, it’s a beautiful reminder of my heritage and that, regardless of how far I’ve come from that place, it’s still embedded in me.

You can also see that in the title of your early EP Dark Continent. Did you always know you wanted to represent that part of your identity?

Mon Rovîa: Kind of, yeah. I think I’ve always felt like I didn’t deserve to tell the tale – that I had come too far, that I was too American, whatever. The mind plays tricks on you. I had to come a long way fighting through those mental handicaps of doubt and insecurity and belonging until I finally could accept that I could tell the story, that my story was just as important, even though it differs from a lot of my peoples. I could be the one to tell it, because I’m one of the ones that survived it, and can keep it alive. I just hope I can encourage other Liberians to do the same thing, they have their own stories as well.

A lot of the present day mirrors the past. We’ve been afraid to look back, afraid to address the root of the country, of the issues that have lingered through time.

You’ve previously spoken about opening up folk music to people of colour too, right?

Mon Rovîa: I only knew it as being a white experience, so I didn’t feel like I could even [make folk music]. That’s what I was saying when, in COVID, I was just like, ‘Ah, fuck it. I'm just gonna go back [to folk] because I like this music.’ It doesn’t matter if I’m Black or not. As we grew and talked as a team, we realised, ‘Oh, this is really important for me to be doing this.’ There are a lot of young Black kids all around the world, [I hope my music] also opens up their eyes, like, ‘Oh, I can do something different and still tell my story.’

What stories inspire you?

Mon Rovîa: I love Lord of the Rings. That’s probably one of my favourite stories of all time, because it’s simple. It’s the story of one man not meant to do anything, the smallest of us doing the biggest journey, going through incredible challenges. [There’s] community, the need for a best friend to go with you that believes in you to the end, even when you give up on yourself. It’s just too much.

But also, with speakers that presented the issues of their time, James Baldwin 100 per cent. I read a lot of his writing. I’m currently reading Toni Morrison – her words are so beautiful. I spend a lot of time learning about the Civil Rights movement and African Americans of that time, because a lot of the present day mirrors the past. We’ve been afraid to look back, afraid to address the root of the country, of the issues that have lingered through time.

I look at my artistry as someone that could say something in these times equivalent to those people back then. I want to be an artist that is remembered in that vein – that he said something in times when nobody said anything, that went out when everybody stayed in. We're all embers of some history, man, we have to keep it burning.

Mon Rôvia’s new single “Running Boy” is out now.