Victoria has been singing with a guitar from the age of fifteen. Her original songs range in genres. Victoria hit the Cleveland folk scene in 1974. Bob Gibson said of her, “she sounds like herself and writes great songs, don’t compare her to Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez. Don’t change anything.” Victoria has had more than forty years since writing her own brand of song.

Victoria is the recipient of the 2009 Free Press Arts and Activism Award. She is an honoree in the 2005 Great American Song Contest; a category winner in the 15th Annual Mid Atlantic Contest Category Winner (humorous); a 2002 Florida Folk Festival Song Contest performer; Napa Valley Folk Festival song contest winner. She has released three albums Sure Feels Like Home(1995), Wild English Rose (2003), and Duhmocracy (2007). Wild English Rose landed #35 in the 2003 FolkDJ top 200 folk albums of 2003. Her songs are unique, beautiful and funny. She tries not to make you cry but, be forewarned, she may. Her 2007 release, Duhmocracy, will certainly make people laugh. It was nominated “best political album” at the 2009 Just Plain Folks Awards, while her song Blame the Cows garnered a “best political song” nomination. Sometimes VIctoria writes a pop song too. She draws her song material from simple emotion, life experience, or crazy news. You just never know what she’ll conjure up under that wildly curly head of hair. It could be a wildly beautiful ballad or just plain hilarious.

1)    Put together your fantasy band, dead or alive.

How could I do any better than the Traveling Willburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Tom Petty? Add to that band, Mark Knofler, and Chrissie Hynde. Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton would be a great addition too.

2)    What's the best, most exciting concert, music event you've been to?

In high school our classmate’s dad was a huge concert promoter in Cleveland. In 1971 she got our entire class tiks to the Grateful Dead, in front and center seats!

3)    What the best (or most important) thing about the music scene in Columbus?

It seems to foster some of the best talent I have heard anywhere.There are lots of very inspired and talented young writers popping up in Central Ohio!

4)    What's the most important issue (political or otherwise) going on in Columbus?

The problem is voting rights. Horrible voter suppression laws are being pushed by extremist right legislators everywhere, but here in Franklin County, we are the biggest swing county in the most important swing state. That makes early voting here really, really important! All these abhorrent voter suppression laws are designed to keep democrats, women, college students and seniors away from the polls. SoS Husted's recent move allowing only two Saturdays and no Sundays to vote early in the statewide election this fall, is an affront to the voting public and should not be tolerated. Early voting has worked too well as far as Secretary Husted and his party is concerned. It is so obvious where his motivation and loyalty lies and it is not to voters.

5) Customized just for you: What's your favorite personally written original song and why?

I think it would have to be This is Our Democracy (aka My Vote Don’t Matter). On November 2, 2004, election day, it rained in prodigious amounts in only Ohio and Florida. The rain set the mood of the song I wrote about that sad day when all voting Americans were both witness and victims of the same crime— a rigged election. In Ohio, besides the rain (which I still believe was weaponized weather) we had vote hopping, voter purges, undelivered voting machines, rigged tabulators, viral voting machine malware, ballot rotation anomalies in Cuyahoga, precincts padded with fifty votes for Bush in several precincts in Butler, 354 consecutive votes for Bush in Delaware in one Genoa Township precinct, and lots of voter suppression of every variety. But the strangest story of all, broken by the Free Press, was the routing of voting results from Kenneth Blackwell’s SoS website through GOP servers that were housed in the basement of an Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattenooga, Tennessee which, in the wee hours of the morning of November 3rd, changed everything. People awoke the next morning in total shock that G.W. Bush, not John Kerry, had won the presidency. Much of this we did not know about until at least 2005, however on election day 2004 in Franklin County, you did not need after-the-fact investigators, auditors and the Free Press to know this game was rigged. The rain came down in buckets while lines of frustrated voters with their umbrellas, snaked around entire city blocks in an attempt to cast their ballots. Thousands gave up in frustration. In the aftermath, a public hearing was held before the Franklin County BOE in November, ’04, when multiple witnesses testified about their voting experience. One man told a story of how he had been voting in the same precinct for years but found his name had been illegally purged from the rolls some time before election day ’04. I came home from that hearing and wrote My Vote Don’t Matter. How can this possibly be happening? People had better double check your voter registration because if you are of color, a woman, a senior, a democrat or a student, your name may not be on the rolls when you show up to vote. Brad Friedman of the Bradblog uses the song as a theme for his Bradcast on KPFA to this day.

Keep an ear out for her on the first Wednesday of every month at the NSAI Songwriter Series at Cementos in Upper Arlington, You might catch a song or two from her. Don’t miss Comfest where Parks is organizing a Pete Seeger Tribute & Hootenanny with some of Columbus’ best local folkies. You can find her music at victoriaparks.com and duhstbunnies.com