A Child of the First Liberian Civil War, Singer-Songwriter Mon Rovia Plants His Roots in Tennessee

I meet Mon Rovîa on the back deck of a coffee shop overlooking Coolidge Park in his home base of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mon Rovîa—a moniker he took on several years ago—looks up at me as I approach. We greet each other and shake hands. It’s springtime and the sky is bright blue above us, a cool breeze in the air. He’s sitting at a table, a white to-go cup of hot tea is sitting on the wooden table in front of him. The 30-something singer-songwriter is unassuming, sitting by himself, wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, a short, simple white-beaded necklace around his neck. 

Before he became the artist behind the song “Crooked Road,” which has surpassed 61 million streams on Spotify, he was Janjay Lowe. 

Lowe was born in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, during the First Liberian Civil War, a brutal skirmish that left 200,000 dead and more than a million people displaced. By the time he was born, the city, once a refuge during the seven-year war, had deteriorated, with life-threatening food and medical shortages. Rival factions and government soldiers roamed the streets, spreading violence wherever they went. 

For a child living there during this time, the chance of becoming a soldier was high. Recruited as young as age 6 by warring gangs, up to 20,000 children were trained to maim, rape, and murder civilians. Many of them witnessed horrific acts of violence, were wounded, or killed.

Lowe, whose mother died in childbirth, lived with his grandmother, brother, and sister. He was adopted at age 7 by an American Christian missionary family, who, after two years of living in war-torn Monrovia, relocated him to Florida. The only member of his family to escape the war, his siblings and grandmother stayed in Monrovia. Lowe doesn’t remember a lot from his early childhood, but he does remember his adopted family’s bustling home while living in Liberia.

“My family was always taking in kids that had lost their parents as well, so we had a lot of people in and out of our house all the time, he says. “Young boys, child soldiers that turned from a war that came to live with us.”

From Florida, Lowe and his adopted family moved to Montana and then to Nassau for five years. Lowe eventually went back to Monrovia when he was around 10 or 11, during the Second Civil War. That trip, he says, was much more memorable. “That gave me a lot more color and a lot more fear of my land,” he says. 

Growing up as part of a middle-class, white American, evangelical Christian family was a completely different experience than in Monrovia. Life revolved around church, and he was sheltered from the secular world, especially music. 

It wasn’t until he discovered Mumford & Sons, Bon Iver, and Fleet Foxes in high school that music became part of his life. 

Lowe moved to Chattanooga to play football at Covenant College, a private, conservative Christian school on Lookout Mountain, just outside of downtown.

But his Liberian past was catching up to him. Depression and survivor’s guilt set in.  

“I was running from everything. I was running from identity. I was running from the loss of my mother, the truth about my family, the truth of all these different things, shattering me, becoming depressed, me falling into drugs and drinking and loss and trying to find security and peace. But that stuff doesn’t last, unless I looked deeper.”

He tells me that he started to think a lot about his history during this period. 

“I would be foolish not to say that that was a driving factor to the chaos of my mind,” he says. “I wanted to know more about my family, my mother, my father that I didn’t know. And there was always a piece of me that asked questions like, ‘How did I come to be?’ It was a fearful question because it was wartime. Could it have been rape? A lot of people have a hard time coming to terms [with the idea] that perhaps their existence does not come out of love.”

His adoptive father offered him guidance and a chance to move back in with them. Instead, Lowe quit college and moved to California, living alone for the first time. During this period, he embraced music as a way to process his feelings and took on the stage name Mon Rovîa as a tribute to all that he left behind in his home country. He began uploading his songs—mainly rap—to SoundCloud. 

“I always loved singer-songwriters. At that time as a Black man, I was doing hip-hop because I felt like that was the way into the music scene,” he says. “Because it’s what I had seen. I hadn’t seen many people in those times that looked like me playing folk music.” 

After living in California for three years, Lowe moved back to Chattanooga during the COVID pandemic in 2020. His parents had given him a ukulele a couple of years prior, something that he noodled around with, but never took seriously. 

That same year, he released his first EP, Sunburnt, and in 2021, his debut album, Dark Continent, both hinting at an eventual musical transformation, blending folk instruments with R&B, hip-hop, and trap. 

With the encouragement of his friend and manager Eric Cromartie, Lowe began writing more personal, introspective songs, and improving his ukulele skills. While he didn’t get much traction with his rap on SoundCloud, his Afro-Appalachian folk music on TikTok did, gaining him more than 300,000 followers in one year. As of this writing, his following has more than tripled. 

“It was cool because I really always wanted to do this, but I was never confident in my own skin and my own journey,” he says.

Two things helped him gain the confidence to fully embrace the folk genre: reading books by African-American writers and activists like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka, and living in the mountains of Chattanooga, surrounded by nature. 

“The history of Appalachia in general, just going further back into the slaves that came over, the banjo coming from West Africa, the conglomerate of Irish people living in these mountains, in these hills, singing these songs over time. I can’t say I listened to a lot of music from this place that influenced my writing of Appalachia, but I happened to be African and live in the foothills of Appalachia, so it was kind of a name that just came together seamlessly.”

Beginning in 2023 and into 2025, Lowe released a series of four EPs inspired by the hero’s journey: Act 1: The Wandering, Act 2: Trials, Act 3: The Dying of Self, and Act 4: Atonement.

He was named one of Spotify’s 2024 “Juniper Artists to Watch,” and he made his music festival debut at Bonnaroo that same year. Then, in July 2025, he played at the Grand Ole Opry. 

His second album, Bloodline, was released in January 2026, a quiet, introspective, vulnerable acoustic folk album that focuses on his experiences growing up as a Black immigrant raised in a white, conservative household. 

Lowe says he had the idea for the title for a long time, back when he was working on Dark Continent. 

“All of this has been a search for that history of myself, and trying to reconnect with pieces that have been lost along the way of me growing and coming across and figuring out my identity in the American ethos. I always was making interesting music, but I never found a sound that I really needed to lock into. From there, I was able to then start creating the process of the album. 

One of the standout tracks on the album is “Field Song.,” inspired by his time as a groundskeeper on Lookout Mountain. “Baby I been working some things off / tryna get right for myself / not anybody / thinking ’bout days gone by / running near still water creek / chasing huckleberries / wish I was yours,” he sings soulfully.