Lay It All Down

Libby Roderick: Artist Biography Libby is an internationally acclaimed singer/songwriter, poet, activist, teacher and lifelong Alaskan. The surprising power and depth of her music and the humor and spontaneity of her performances have attracted large and enthusiastic audiences across the continent and fans all over the world. Her five recordings have received rave reviews and extensive airplay across the country. The premiere national U.S. folk magazine, Dirty Linen, calls Libby 'one of the most compassionate and caring songwriters recording today,' and the Worcester Massachussetts Telegraph said Libby 'may be the folk music find of the decade!' Australia's Rhythms music magazine calls Libby 'a singer-songwriter of compassion and insight' and Ladyslipper Distribution describes her as 'original, introspective, poetic, articulate, politically conscious and spiritually inspired.' Libby is well-known as an exhilarating and witty artist who offers a remarkable blend of passionate music, wry humor and incisive commentary on social and personal issues. In 1998, Libby was named a finalist for the coveted national Green Dove Award which honors people whose work links creativity, psychology and ecology, and for the Alaska Woman of Achievement Award for contributions to her home state. She is one of 225 world citizens (including the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Winona LaDuke, Ursula LeGuin and many others) whose writing was included in a book called Prayers for a Thousand Years: Inspiration from Leaders and Visionaries Around the World. Along with Paul Winter, John McCutcheon, Lou and Peter Berryman and other artists, Libby donated a track to a recording entitled 'One Land, One Heart' by Musicians United to Sustain the Earth to raise money for wilderness preservation in the U.S. She is also a faculty member of the Institute for Deep Ecology, along with internationally renowned activists and teachers Joanna Macy, David Abrams, John Seed and others. She conducts workshops on a range of topics for universities nationwide. Libby's recordings have been enormously successful worldwide and her folk classic, 'How Could Anyone,' has been translated into several languages, recorded by many artists and reprinted in many books (including Hometown by Pulitzer-prize winner Tracy Kidder). It was sung by Hillary Clinton and thousands of others at the U.N. Conference in Beijing. Libby has sung for Coretta Scott King in Washington D.C. and shared bills with Grammy-award winners Janis Ian and Dave van Ronk. Libby was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, where she still lives part of the time. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in American Studies, and has worked as a TV and print news reporter, radio consultant, nuclear weapons educator and writer on Alaska Native issues.