Landslide top vote-getter at the Falcon Ridge (NY) Folk Festival's "Most-Wanted" competition (1996) and NAIRD "Indie" nominee (singer-songwriter album of the year - 1994) for Digging Through My Closet, DAVID ROTH has gained national attention for his unique songs, moving stories, and powerful singing and subject matter.

Since emerging from another nationwide field of several hundred songwriters to open the 1987 Kerrville (TX) Folk Festival as its New Folk winner, the Chicago native (and two-time national anthem singer for the NBA's Michael Jordan-era Bulls) has garnered accolades for his performances, workshops, writing, and recordings. Roth has since been a songwriting judge at the Napa Valley (CA), Tumbleweed (WA), and South Florida Folk Festivals in addition to singing "Earth" at the 40th Anniversary of the United Nations and having his "Rising in Love" performed at the 100th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall in 1991. "Manuel Garcia" and "Nine Gold Medals" both appear in the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, and Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul & Mary) performed David's "Spacesuits" on the 1999/2000 PPM tours in addition to recording "If You Can't Fly" for his latest children's album. The BOSE Corporation includes "Taller Than My Hair" and "Five Blind Men" on their recent "best of new folk" compilations sold in Bose stores worldwide.

Several of David's songs also appear in the business best-selling books Care Packages for the Workplace and Care Packages for the Home by Barbara Glanz (published by McGraw-Hill and Andrews-McMeel respectively).

More About David
(by David)

I was born in Chicago long enough ago to remember the great snowstorm of '67. Got to miss a week of school, and we took my sled to the Jewel supermarket instead of our gold convertible Pontiac LeMans, which didn't do too well on snow. This was my second favorite vehicle, next to the silver and red one-speed Schwinn bike I rode, housed each winter in the garage whose door I pitched imaginary baseball games against every summer. I loved baseball as a kid, and was convinced I'd grow up to play first base for the White Sox one day (my older sister adopted the Cubs, so I had to send my loyalties to the south side, even though we lived on the north). My dad was the Maitre D' at Chicago's Chez Paree nightclub, and my mother was a big band singer. I had a crush on the McGuire Sisters. All three of them.

My first job as a busboy at Arlington Park Racetrack when I was 13 saw me work there every summer through high school (Skokie, IL) where my music teacher was Frank Winkler, the great jazz pianist and former touring keyboardist for Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Sammy Davis Jr. We're still in touch and Frank sits in with me when I sing in Chicago (not bad - the guy who used to tell me to spit out my gum is now my sideman!). Went downtown to Wabash Street with my best friend Judd when I was a senior and paid a couple hundred bucks for a new Gibson B-25 guitar with a sunburst top. My first lick - "Daytripper" by the Beatles. The first song I labored to learn was "April Come She Will" by Simon & Garfunkel.

Continued on to the University of Illinois, 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 the red 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, Carole King, Cat Stevens, Jackson Browne, JT, Alan Sherman, Tony Bennett, 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, Freddy and the Dreamers. 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 nowadays).

Upon graduation (a degree in Radio/TV Communications) I took a job as a copywriter at a small ad agency in Anchorage, Alaska. I was half of the creative department (2 people). I wrote, he drew. I remember being thrilled that I could be paid money to write words, and I used to stay late - I enjoyed writing with no one else around. My advertising career lasted exactly five months when I lost my interest (which I've 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, 4-6 PM Mondays thru Thursdays. The soldiers and sailors came in and drank til there was blood in their alcohol stream. Some told me I sounded pretty good. 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 (juvenile facility) for the Department of Health and Social Services; an actor for the Alaska Repertory Theatre; and front man for a country-rock/bluegrass band called "Kicks".

Rewind...while still in college in Illinois, my friend Jim and I went and saw "The Man Who Would Be King" based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling. We were inspired that night to have a big travel adventure one day, and when we were 26, 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 which not only served to introduce us to free hotel rooms, new friends, meals, and extra money at all the right times, but even survived getting run over by a car while we hitchhiked on the South Island of New Zealand.

Thus I traveled from Los Angeles to New York City the hard way (going west) and ended up at Newark Airport in the Spring of 1980. Settled in to a variety of sublets and went down to Greenwich Village one Monday night where I stumbled into Folk City and the Cornelia Street Cafe to meet some of the singer songwriters of the day...Jack Hardy, Brian Rose, Suzanne Vega, David Massengill, Cliff Eberhardt, Tom Intondi, Rod MacDonald, Josh Joffen, and anybody else who happened to be passing through New York City with a guitar and an idea.

I was hooked, intimidated, intrigued, addicted, and an obvious neophyte, but at Cornelia Street and at Jack Hardy's, everyone who showed up to these gatherings would only play a "work in progress". It wasn't a showcase for greatest hits or polished jewels, rather the rawest and most recent writing that anyone was willing to put out in front of the group. My "visit" to New York City lasted nine years, and my Monday nights of open mikes and all night-cafe´s proved to be an inspiring songwriting workplace. Had a lot of part time jobs during this time, including wearing a sandwich sign on Broadway, cutting leather in a factory, office temp work, waiting tables, and later on working as an audio engineer at UN Radio and ABC-TV.

Came up for air and entered the Kerrville Folk Festival's songwriting contest in Texas in 1985. Got as far as making the list of forty finalists. Came back from that festival thinking about what I'd learned hearing people like Chuck Pyle, Steve Gillette, Pierce Pettis, Jon Ims, Mike Williams, and LJ Booth for the first time, entered again the next year, did well. A friend holding up a walkman tape recorder in the audience during that contest gave me what turned out to be the demo tape 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 multimedia programs to audiences that included the U.S. Congress, the Pentagon, National Geographic, Kodak, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, countless conferences, retreats, churches. He'd heard a couple of my songs and invited me on a Florida tour where we ended up doing shows in 30 cities in 31 days, and here I'd found another audience in addition to mainstream folk fans (oxymoron?). This proved a springboard to more work as a musician and presenter at a variety of conferences, symposiums, camps, workshop centers, retreats, and special events of all kinds, and I said goodbye to the last of my part time jobs in 1987. I TRIED to do many of the things my folks might have preferred for me over the years, but I always came back to this. As Confucius said "If you choose a job that you love, you'll never work another day in your life." Why was he called "Confucius"? He should have been called "Clarity-boy".

Other notes:

• Sang 2 national anthems for the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls.
• Inclusion in several 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' books, and books by Gerry Jampolsky, Barbara Glanz, Alan Cohen, and Joan Baker-Gonzalez.
• Andrea Marcovicci performance of David's "Rising in Love" at the 100th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall.
• Performed "Earth" at the 40th Anniversary of the United Nations.
• Several summers as artist in residence at NY's Omega Institute.
• 1994 world premier of David's original one-man play "The Gripes of Roth" at the Nomad Theater in Boulder, CO.

Concerts
Festivals, clubs, concert halls, coffeehouses, and venues across the U.S. and Canada have sponsored David, who 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.

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 was musician-in-residence at New York's Omega Institute for several summers and teaches across the U.S. and Canada.