There’s a New Generation of Folk Protest Singers on TikTok

The set-up for a typical Jesse Welles video is simple: the 32-year-old stands in an open field under a string of powerlines, clutching an acoustic guitar. From behind a tousled, curly mop of hair, he stares straight into the camera and starts singing.

“If you’re in need of a gig that’ll help you feel big, come with me and put some folks in detention,” he deadpans in one song, a scathing critique of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. “We can sneak around town, hunting working folks down, I hear they get a great benefit plan.”

“Join ICE” is just one of the dozens of songs Welles routinely shares on social media. They’re often short and satirical tunes, riding on his coarse voice and fingerpicked guitar strings, that respond to the major headlines of the week. They challenge the narratives presented to Americans by governments and corporations; they draw historical parallels and unearth underlying tensions that lead people to blame one another for institutional injustices.

On the Internet, Jesse Welles’ songs are major hits. Thousands of people flock to the comments, calling him a modern day Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie. Since he started regularly posting clips last year, Welles has amassed more than 3 million followers on TikTok and Instagram combined, not to mention his over 600,000 YouTube subscribers. The Recording Academy has also taken notice; last week, Welles received four Grammy nominations in the folk and Americana categories. He’s become one of the most visible examples of a new generation of digital-savvy artists bringing folk traditions to a modern medium.

“We’ve never been this informed,” Welles tells NPR about Americans today. “Pair being informed with being disempowered — being that aware and having so little hard influence on the aspects of your life that you’re so awake to. I think that explains a lot of people’s frustration.”

Welles wasn’t always a country-leaning singer-songwriter. He spent years playing in different iterations of rock bands, experimenting with folk and grunge. Nearly a decade ago, he signed to a label in Nashville, burnt out and went back home to Arkansas. In 2024, after his father suffered a heart attack, the now-independent artist says he had a spiritual awakening that put him on his current path. The songs began to pour out, some political and some not. So far, his music has addressed the war in Gaza, the Epstein list and the Trump administration’s claims that Tylenol is linked to autism.

Although Welles’ lyrics skew pro-working class and anti-violence, fans trying to neatly categorize his political affiliations might run into trouble. In August, he raised some eyebrows when he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. A month later, he released a song condemning the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It sparked both praise and backlash. On TikTok and Instagram, some people questioned how Welles could mourn a man who often made bigoted statements about minorities and helped elect the same politicians the singer criticizes in his lyrics. Welles says that for him, there’s no use in trying to control how people perceive him or how they attempt to project partisan lines onto his music. His bottom line, he says, is radical nonviolence.

“I visit a lot of different echo chambers. I pop in, pop out — see what’s going on in different corners,” Welles says. “You start to wonder, where’s the throughline? Because there’s obviously an issue, but neither corners’ justifications for their actions or reactions is really satisfying. So I think I just started looking for some sense.”

Audiences on and offline are right there with him. Welles released multiple studio albums this year, which include collaborations with rising Americana stars Sierra Ferrell and Billy Strings. He was awarded the 2025 John Prine Songwriting Fellowship and performed at both Newport Folk Festival and Farm Aid. He’s also been selling out shows across the country, where he’s been joined onstage by Joan Baez and John Fogerty. Welles’ success shows that his music is resonating widely, as a new generation of artists revive bold, plainspoken protest music for today’s digital age.

A long tradition of protest songs

Protest music has always been deeply embedded in the American fabric, but its popularity has come and gone. Tammy L. Kernodle, a musicologist and professor at Miami University, says there’s been different moments throughout history in which the folk music of particular communities or ethnic groups has been used for mass mobilization.

“When we talk about folk music, we’re talking about the music that developed out of the everyday experiences of people. It was part of their ritual,” she explains. “Within those repertoires, there’s always been songs that have been about articulating people’s frustration.”

Throughout the 20th century, folk music played a key role in organizing movements across labor, politics, race and gender. From the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, the struggle for liberation played out explicitly in protest songs and implicitly in the emergence of new genres like rock, disco and hip-hop. But as the century came to a close, Kernodle says folk songs documenting people’s realities and advocating for social change became less and less central to pop culture.

“When we started to move into the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, those messages started to be filtered out because of the infrastructure and how music became so vastly commodified because of globalization,” Kernodle says. “The industry began to work against it.”

In the early to mid-2000s, major labels and mainstream radio stations mostly shied away from songs with overt political messaging, though folk, punk and protest scenes still flourished underground. With the rise of social media, it became easier for artists to bypass industry gatekeepers. In the last decade, hip-hop has largely carried the torch of musical protest, particularly during the Black Lives Matter mobilizations of 2020 and the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, anyone can write a song and upload it to the internet, but they’re also competing with a flood of information: a 24-hour news cycle, personalized algorithms and never-ending scrolling.

With an increasingly fractured attention economy and a deeply polarized society, many people are looking for spaces of connection; communities that take their concerns seriously and make them feel heard. Kernodle says the simplicity of a front-facing camera and a banjo or guitar calls back to earlier folk traditions; simpler days of someone singing about their day on a front porch or in a town hall — and it carries real power.

“We are moving into a society that wants to read less. Most of us are getting our information from this very visual culture: TikTok, Instagram and all of these things,” Kernodle explains. “Music is also underscored. So these individuals are doing what their predecessors did, but on a different digital platform.”

How one artist cuts through the noise

One of those artists is Mon Rovîa, who’s racked up more than 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, all before releasing his debut album. Born in Liberia during the West African nations’ first civil war, he was adopted by an American missionary family as a child. Mon Rovîa moved around a lot growing up and gravitated towards reading and writing poetry; as he got older, he settled in Tennessee and began channeling his energy into music, initially dabbling with hip-hop and bedroom alt-pop. In 2022, he planted his feet into an Afro-Appalachian sound that blends indie folk influences like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver with the musical traditions of the region he now calls home.

He says music did not play a big role in his early childhood in Liberia — but given Appalachian folk music’s deep roots in West African instruments and rhythms, Mon Rovîa’s sound comes full circle, doubly honoring his identity. He writes guitar and ukulele-driven melodies that nudge his honeyed vocals to the forefront, often reminiscent of the intimate folk songs of British troubadour Labi Siffre. On TikTok, he’ll share videos of himself playing and singing with friends, or will overlay his songs over clips of himself making tea. This kind of content is often at odds with the attention-grabbing, chaotic pace of the algorithm. Amid that slow tranquility, Mon Rovîa delivers messages against oppression, gun violence and war.

“A lot of times, the world is already too loud and angry,” he tells NPR. “Peace and thoughtfulness can cut through a lot of that noise.”

His song “Heavy Foot,” which he performed during his Grand Ole Opry debut this summer, rallies around collective care and empathy in the face of hostile politicians and systems of power. “Do you see the man on the screen, just a puppet but you never see the strings,” Mon Rovîa sings. “Calling it a war ‘n not a genocide, telling us it isn’t what it seems.”

On social media, he’s shared the song over clips of pro-Palestinian protests around the world, as well as with text that reads: “‘Who radicalized you?’ I did NOT recite ‘with liberty and justice for all’ every morning at 7AM just to be called radical for wanting liberty and justice for all.”

Beyond social media, he also performed alongside Jesse Welles at this year’s Newport Folk Festival and is selling out national tours. Although Mon Rovîa didn’t initially set out to make protest music, he says he’s embracing the movement.

“I think the important piece about protest music is the truth factor,” he says. “I think it becomes protest because we put that word around it, but really it’s just a search for the truth. To reveal it and to say it as it is and not beat around the bush.”

He credits writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison with inspiring him to make art as a personal form of activism. Musicologist Kernodle says these links in time — in instruments, themes and influences — are an essential part of the protest folk tradition.

“True protest music does this. It reflects on the past. It is documenting the present, and what it is speaking to is the hope of the future,” she says. “That’s what we see in some of this material that is coming out of these digital platforms.”

Looking at the future

For 28-year-old singer-songwriter Jensen McRae, that lineage is a grounding exercise for facing the current political climate.

“I have Post-it notes above my desk, and it just has a list of all of the Black women from history that I admire and am trying to model myself after,” she tells NPR. “It says, ‘You’re standing on the shoulders of your ancestors, you can get through this.’ ”

McRae is a 21st century Laurel Canyon-style folk singer with indie rock sensibilities. Raised in Los Angeles with a steady soundtrack of pop, R&B and Carole King, she studied music at the University of Southern California. As a college student, she traded in piano for acoustic guitar as her primary instrument when she realized it was much easier to carry from gig to gig. She wanted to become a storyteller, and to her that meant writing folk songs.

In 2021, she wrote a viral Phoebe Bridgers parody track about getting the COVID-19 vaccine at Dodger Stadium. She’s released two acoustic-pop albums since then, full of heartbreaking and incisive lyricism (she jokes that as a woman, people expect her to write songs about the worst thing that’s ever happened to her — and she delivers). She’s sold out shows on both sides of the Atlantic, opened for acts like MUNA and Noah Kahan and found a fan in none other than Justin Bieber. This summer, she also appeared in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest. But as she’s found more mainstream success, McRae has also felt a deep responsibility to respond to “the historical moment that we’re in that’s been going on for basically my entire adult life.”

Online, she shares defiantly unpolished protest songs like “You Started It” and “The Men are Disappearing” to her more than 500,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. Shot on McRae’s phone, the stripped-down videos of her singing and strumming the guitar don’t necessarily look out of place on her social media feeds. She’s the kind of internet native who regularly posts works-in-progress song clips, covers and snippets of herself reading old diary entries. But in her more political songs, pinned to the top of her TikTok profile, McRae touches on school shootings, racial injustice, the military industrial complex and the deportation of migrants from the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador.

She says that with how long it takes to craft an album, she’s drawn to posting political songs online for the immediacy — she wants to meet the moment as it’s happening. She also finds catharsis in not having to think about branding or marketing the music; instead, the songs are a tool for raising consciousness.

“There’s a part of me that feels a little bit funny about profiting off of that music,” she says, noting that her TikTok is not monetized. “The reason that I’m writing it is to give other people the language to talk about this thing that maybe they don’t understand.” Existing as a folk artist closer to the pop mainstream, she sees her role akin to “sneaking vegetables into people’s brownies” — sparking sociopolitical awareness in audiences that may not be overtly seeking it out. That in itself, she says, is a form of resistance.

“My hope is that in 30 or 50 years, my children or grandchildren will be living in a time where the pendulum has swung back in a more progressive direction,” McRae says. “They’ll look back and go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you were making art during that time when that administration and that court and those police forces were so conservative and were so combative.’ I want to be a part of the reason why future generations feel like they can say anything and do anything.”

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