What’s Up Interview: Billy Bragg, singer and activist, plays at the Newport Folk Festival on July 27

English folk singer, songwriter and activist Billy Bragg is no stranger to the Newport Folk Festival. He first played at the annual gathering at Fort Adams State Park in 1993 and most recently returned in 2017 as part of the “Speak Out” sessions, sharing the stage with Jim James, Margo Price and Nathaniel Rateliff.

Bragg returns to the Fort Stage this year on July 27 at 12:25 p.m., an early appearance sure to delight Newport fans. He recently logged on from across the pond for a Zoom chat where he weighed in on music, politics and the importance of Newport folk in the annals of pop music history.

The songwriter emerged in England in the early 1980s, taking an aggressive, punk-influenced approach to acoustic music. “I’m in a strange situation,” he laughed. “I get to play folk festivals, rock festivals, and Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas. I kind of tick all the boxes.”

Bragg is delighted at the opportunity to play in Newport and is well aware of the festival’s heritage. “What’s special about Newport is its profile, which goes beyond a general festival,” he began. “It stands for something; it has a reputation that precedes it and it has a history behind it. Not just the history of Bob Dylan’s electronic music that we all know, but also the strong tradition of protest music at the festival.”

“It’s at Fort Adams, you’re in a historic place, wandering around these rooms where there were big guns, where maybe someone was doing a radio interview – the last time I was there I had a photo shoot,” he said.

Bragg looks at folk music from a modern perspective, as an ever-evolving genre of music with a wide spectrum. “Although the music you hear there is not always traditional, the festival has a very traditional atmosphere,” he said. “I like that.”

“The folk genre, it seems to me, was replaced by Americana, which has a lot of things in it, a lot of roots, soul, basically a lot of African-American roots music comes across that way,” he explained. “If you look back at the festivals of the 1960s, that was a big part of it. It was always an Americana festival; it was never pure folk. The year Dylan went electric, Muddy Waters had already played an electric guitar there. It wasn’t like Dylan was introducing something into this pure space where only acoustic instruments had been played before. The festival had already started moving in this Americana direction.”

It’s no secret that Bragg has always placed activism at the heart of his art, with the goal of strengthening the influence of unions. This has been a fundamental part of his mission since the 1980s, when he rose to international prominence by protesting against former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s British government policies. To this day, he continues to inspire workers around the world. “In my set, I have a song called ‘Between the Wars’ that I wrote during the miners’ strike (in the UK in 1984). When I play it, it sometimes evokes nostalgic feelings in my audience, taking me back to that time,” he noted.

“On another song, ‘There is Power in the Union,’ I see people in the audience who weren’t even born when I wrote that song,” he continued. “They’re putting their fists in the air and singing it at the top of their lungs because a lot of them were on the picket line. In my country, some teachers went on strike; there are nurses, paramedics, people who work on the railroad, and people who work at Amazon. A new generation of people is realizing that unions have power. The last time I was in the U.S., I played at a picket line at Starbucks in Buffalo, and those kids knew more verses of (the workers’ anthem) ‘Solidarity Forever’ than I did.”

Bragg believes the music is relevant to our times. “We’re not looking back to a time that… it’s not old-fashioned music, it’s not Union music,” he said. “Our song that Woody (Guthrie) wrote, ‘All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose,’ for example, I was told by email that the song was trending after the first round of the elections in France.”

Bragg recently wrote a song in response to the controversial Oliver Anthony hit “Rich Men North of Richmond.” “I wrote a song in response (‘Rich Men Earning North of a Million’) that said if you don’t want rich men in total control, then form a union. That’s the way to do it, not just complain about workers living on welfare.”

The Folk Festival is the final stop on Bragg’s mini-tour of the Northeast, which begins July 18 before he returns to the U.S. and Canada in September. He plays the Fort Stage on Saturday, July 27, at 12:25 p.m.

Click here to learn more about Billy Bragg.

Click here to learn more about the Newport Folk Festival.