Greyhound Diaries: Performing Across America In An Election Year

By Doug Levitt

Originally published Nov. 1.

The faces held similar shapes. The seats lined up the same. The sound of applause in a cavernous space flowed in similar frequencies. But the settings were very different. This long American bus journey of 20 years and 200,000 Greyhound miles began back when my skin looked younger. Then, I had my Gibson J100 acoustic guitar, a copy of Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, a six-week Greyhound pass, and a need to know the American identity at the crossroads and on the margins at critical times.

Greyhound serves ten times the number of destinations as the largest airline in America. Its routes are like arteries, veins — even capillaries — through the body of the country and its small towns. Along the way, I began playing in shelters and prisons, VAs, hospital rooms and more. But so too, I’ve played Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Woody Guthrie Center.

In each of these disparate venues, there’s a thirst, a visceral need for communal connection that is universal. It’s a narrative that speaks to our shared struggle that transcends partisan political divides. A Vietnam veteran at one show gave me a woven bracelet he had worn for decades after I had sung about a vet with PTSD who felt dislocated upon returning home.

I’ve also woken up in a full bus on a seat next to a neo-Nazi. There are itinerant laborers and the addicted, folks of every political leaning. Of course, politics can be a conversation that you can’t get out of and on long journeys nobody wants that, so nobody really talks politics. Instead, we find points of connection, not disconnection.

By virtue of the length and breadth of this journey, these widely-varied performances and purposeful journeys during numerous elections through swing states while trying to capture what I’ve seen in song — as well as story and image — I’ve gotten a strong sense of who we are at this pivotal moment in time.

My thesis is that what meshes us, what binds us, are the roots of the American daily society and culture — our sports we watch together, our songs we sing together, the challenges and opportunities of daily life. No one turns to someone at a Rams game and says, “Great touchdown. Who are you voting for?” Our identities are context based, and that’s where these venues come into play. In prison, the need for some release, some outside perspective, something human and woody (no pun indired), just wire wood in air — and stories that are applicable to their lives.

I have a song called “Run It All Back,” which is about a man I met while on the bus named Hector whose son in Oakland was shot by an errant bullet in a car chase. He blamed himself. “Why were we in that neighborhood?” But that feeling of, can we run it back? Can we change the past? It’s a narrative, though, that resonates from folks in prison to the well-heeled at performing arts centers with people across all social strata. 

It is but one of many channels between us, these feelings of commonality. Even if you are from a very different background than I am, you have certain American experiences that are the same, that tap into a deeper truth about who we are. Yes, I could be partisan, support one or another candidate; but more often than not I’d rather just be an American who listens to others and hears them out, because we live in a civil society with common civic roots that speak to the American idea that are this nation’s truest strength.

Voting for so many, and even politics for so many, can seem like a spectator sport of, by, and for others with winners taking all, or most at least. And in this election, as in every recent one, I’ll be traveling on the bus as I have from 2004 to 2024 covering now six presidential elections—George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and this year’s. For many traveling the bus, though, these elections would seem to have little to no bearing on their struggles and their travels.

Struggle is often another commonality on the bus, even if unspoken. I’ve performed in bus stations and before people who have been in at the forefront of social struggles: the living Freedom Riders, who helped desegregate interstate bus travel by riding coaches through the South, knowing that they would likely get injured in their efforts to desegregate society. I performed with them in the same Montgomery, Alabama church that in 1961 Martin Luther King had spoken to the Freedom Riders who there found refuge after being beaten outside of the city’s Greyhound station.

My goal in being entrusted with other people’s stories, is to create a platform that others can relate to. Whether it’s live performances at Attica Prison or with veterans at Walter Reed veterans hospital on my new album Edge of Everywhere (produced by the Grammy-winning Trina Shoemaker) or in the BBC documentaries that chronicle my journey.

Politics, on the other hand, is largely a team sport. I don’t know the statistics, but we’re often backers of a team from a very young age, and coaches change. Some players change, but we still back that team. We still like to listen to news about that team, from that team’s perspective, not to diminish the real issues at stake. And yet, when we broaden it out and connect in ways that we do throughout our days at diners with other people that we work with or network with, or countless other ways that we interact with one another, team allegiances are largely irrelevant.

Greyhound ferries veterans, single parents, the wayward, the downward and upward. The strangest of pairings talking at a truck stop on an overnight at three in the morning. And so my hope now is to help fuel a sense that we have to recognize, appreciate and celebrate that, from where I sit on the Greyhound, thankfully, there is still a oneness among the American people. s

Doug Levitt is a singer/songwriter whose project The Greyhound Diaries chronicles
his journeys across America by bus. Visit douglevitt.com for more information.