“Why was it me?” Mon Rufia​ on moving from war-torn Liberia to stardom in American folk-pop | music

toLong before he began packing theaters and winning millions of listeners with his poetic folk songs, Mon Rufia began life in Liberia at a time when many of his country’s youngest youth were armed with assault rifles and forced to fight as child soldiers in a brutal civil war. After his mother died, his grandmother needed help raising his sister, brother, and him, and placed him with a white missionary family from Florida. He was the only member of his family to escape the war. “This is something that weighed heavily on me growing up,” he says. “Why was it me? Why couldn’t my brothers come, or why wasn’t one of them?” It will be years until what happened to them is known.

Today, his stage name – born Janjay Lowe – is a simplified version of the Liberian capital, Monrovia. His songwriting addresses his fractured identity, the specter of colonialism that surrounded him in Liberia and the United States, and applies emotional intimacy to global reality. His approach, he says, “starts with people trusting that you’re not afraid to be vulnerable in your own way. Then you start talking about the bigger picture.”

Of all the coffee shops in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Louie chose the one for our interview in the downtown business district that appears to be empty for the holidays. Only a few customers come in as we chat over mint tea on a December afternoon, and that suits him. “I don’t really like to be noticed,” he says, wearing a dark flannel shirt. This kind of humility is his trademark: in his sold-out shows, he avoids grand gestures and invites audiences into his apparent calm. But despite his aversion to attention, Lowe stands out among a new generation of singer-songwriters who are translating TikTok fame into tangible success.

On his debut album, Bloodline, the captivating calm of his music is a deliberate contrast to his horrific past. Listeners have compared him to Nick Drake and Labi Siffre, cult heroes with a stylish folk sensibility. He named his music Afro-Appalachian Folk, after learning that one of the banjo’s ancestors also originated in West Africa, and enslaved musicians and their descendants helped create the string band music associated with the region he now calls home. “You just see that these things have been bleached over time,” he says.

Before becoming Moon Ruffia, Louie grew up in a white, middle-class American background—an environment radically different from the one he was born into— He relied on his keen awareness to adapt. “The real person I am was never shown,” he says. “I understood what it meant to be the funny guy. I made friends easily.” But when he was alone with his thoughts, “it was another journey of loneliness.” Deep down, he confessed, “I’m not okay at all, but in this American space I am what I need to be, the privileged black man.”

Louie accepted his adoptive family’s evangelical Christian faith, and life revolved around church. His attendance at private Christian schools isolated him from much of American popular culture, although when he was in high school, the family moved to the Bahamas for mission work and he acquired two foster brothers who introduced him to the Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. Soon he was pouring over the lyrics of a Mumford & Sons song as if it were basic text. “I spent a lot of time with their songs because there was a religious aspect to the struggle, and I was fascinated by it,” he says. When his foster brothers formed a band, he wrote eagerly, but left the lead vocals to them.

With no particular career ambitions, Lowe jumped at the opportunity to play football at his conservative Presbyterian college near Chattanooga. When he first lived on his own, “he was fighting a lot of different things, when it came to adoption, identity, and survivor’s guilt.” He couldn’t help but think how intertwined his experience was with the history of colonialism. Music became a way to process his experiences. Taking his stage name was a way to symbolize his commitment to “remember my people, remember the journey and the blessing of my life and my mother and my siblings who I haven’t thought about in years.”

Initially, he dabbled in melodic rap and digitally programmed bedroom pop. “If you’re a black American, you kind of have to lean into that,” he says of the race-based gender norms that initially felt limiting. But nothing clicked. He then posted an audio clip of the original version of Lark and received enthusiastic feedback from his friend – and future manager – Eric Cromartie. In a separate interview, Cromartie recalls advising him: “Go on TikTok, stop making beats and use your ukulele.” Within three weeks it exploded.”

In 2020, Lowe began self-releasing EPs while working day jobs, but in 2024 he signed with Nettwerk Music Group, the Canadian independent label that launched Sarah McLachlan’s career, and gave up side gigs. “I didn’t think I would ever be able to focus on music, and now I can do it,” he says.

Bloodline took advantage of that freedom. The call for collective resistance to the abuse of power in the gently motivating Heavy Foot movement arose in part from a study of major thinkers in the American civil rights movement, including James Baldwin. A contemplation of the romantic distortions of the American Civil War in the South gave rise to “Somewhere Down in Georgia,” whose swirling guitar figure, pensive vocals and naturalistic imagery feel haunted by the painful, unreconciled history of the South. “They refuse to look at it clearly and do the things necessary to make those adjustments,” he says of the district. “A lot of people in the South live in this degraded place because of that.” Despite these heavy themes, Lowe’s delivery is a gentle marvel.

He also recalls and reframes his painful memories. Pray for Satan’s Return to Hell, through a documentary of the same name, conveys the awe of the Liberian women who ended the war. Black Cauldron follows his evolving perspective on his relationship with his mother. Although her life ended tragically early, he notes, “The story does not end. She has a son who is miraculously saved and is able to help others on their healing journey.”

Plenty of pop and hip-hop artists have used audio recordings as tone breaks, but on Bloodline, Lowe shares audio clips with life-changing significance. They are excerpts of WhatsApp messages from the Liberian sister, now a mother, with whom he only recently reconnected. “This is where I draw a lot of my history,” he says. In the intro to his searching song Whose Face Am I, she can be heard addressing him in Kolokwa – Liberian English – as Janjay and telling him that the father he never met was Senegalese.

Shortly after the album’s release, Louie will begin his second European tour, and he is eager to return to Liberia. Bloggers there started posting about him last year, he’s seen videos of Liberian musicians performing his songs, and the Liberian Music Awards recently named him the Mon Rufia Outstanding Artist of the Year award for 2025. “It was the greatest joy of my life to be welcomed back in a place where I never thought I would ever be welcomed,” he says.