ARTIST DOUG LEVITT HAS TRAVELED MORE THAN 12 YEARS AND 120,000 BUS MILES WRITING ABOUT FELLOW TRAVELERS 

 DOCUMENTARY AIRS NOVEMBER 3 AND 4 AHEAD OF U.S. MID-TERM ELECTIONS  

DOUG LEVITT IN UK NOV 1 - 2

Performs at BBC Broadcasting House Nov 1

The Village Studios in Los Angeles Nov 3

American singer-songwriter Doug Levitt has traveled more than 12 years and 120,000 miles by Greyhound, writing songs, stories, and gathering images of fellow bus riders at the crossroads.

Now, a one-hour documentary that airs November 3 and 4 on radio reveals that for the overlooked and under-reflected who travel by Greyhound, struggle is the one commonality virtually all aboard share.  It is the force that governs life, a permanent Depression -- irrespective of any economic data.  

With 25 times the number of destinations in America as the largest airline, Greyhound's ridership, "Cuts across every demographic," Levitt says, "with one glaring exception, class."  

"There is no other realm where immigrant laborers and neo-Nazis, retirees and runaways, ex-felons and vets, members of rival gangs all share a roughly 10-yard by 3-yard space for days on end in cases. There are no other available options so there's a kind of unity of necessity."   

Along the way, Levitt has performed his Greyhound Diaries in a range of places, including the Woody Guthrie Center, the Kennedy Center, and Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as shelters, VAs, prison and ex-offender programs.  

The former-foreign correspondent's dozen-plus-year project has traversed three different presidents, Republican and Democrat, and a congressional swing in each chamber, and back.  "Poverty is not only boom proof, for those not in the asset economy, it means they recede ever-further from those who own them.  And many people who travel by bus are neither left, nor right, but left out entirely."  

Bus riders would see the direct effects of the largest economic cataclysm since the Great Depression; the growing disparity in Its wake; the entwined epidemics of addiction and mental illness; America's two longest declared wars in history, waged concurrently by many of the vets who would ride the bus between tours; a mass incarceration and recidivism crisis; and new anti-immigration directives.

The BBC documentary -- which follows Levitt as he performs in Woody Guthrie's Oklahoma hometown, for veterans, and in a prison in Colorado -- includes conversations with riders that are rendered into songs along the way. The radio version documentary airs in the U.S. and abroad at 2 p.m. ET / 1900 GMT on November 3rd on the BBC World Service and 1200 GMT on November 4th.

Levitt is working on a record with multi-Grammy-winning producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker (Brandi Carlile, Josh Ritter, Sheryl Crow), and The Museum of Social Justice in Los Angeles is putting up a large multimedia exhibition of his work in February.  

Please let me know if you have any questions, or would like to book/interview Doug while he's in the UK.

More can be found at greyhounddiaries.org.