Folk Music Quotes

1. "I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music."
Author: Alan Lomax

2. "There's not that much English folk music that is really that appealing."
Author: Alison Goldfrapp

3. "Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'"
Author: Ani DiFranco

4. "The big turning point, really, was the Beatles' influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came the Lovin' Spoonful and everybody else."
Author: Barry McGuire

5. "Folk is bare bones music."
Author: Ben Harper

6. "I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music."
Author: Ben Harper

7. "My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center."
Author: Ben Harper

8. "As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home.""I prefer normal music.""Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse."
Author: Beth Fantaskey

9. "I'd like to teach kids how to write songs. This will be my first year so I'm just as green as some of the rest of the folks. It's like a music camp and I get to hang out with some of the past contestants."
Author: Bo Bice

10. "I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."
Author: Bob Dylan

11. "Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people."
Author: Brownie McGhee

12. "I live in Nashville, and I don't know how many people there would call me country. I really started in punk and anti-folk, but one of the reasons I originally gravitated towards country music is because most of those songs only use three chords. That was the easiest place for me to start, but I'm always trying to expand what I do."
Author: Caitlin Rose

13. "Folk musicians have a lot of the same self-importance, but they're way more cruel and jealous than rock musicians - I know this for a fact because I used to be a folk musician."
Author: Christopher Guest

14. "My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it."
Author: David Crosby

15. "People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education."
Author: David Soul

16. "Folk music was out there. Clubs were springing up and they were hot with the college kids."
Author: Dick Smothers

17. "Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors."
Author: Donal Henahan

18. "Have you been listening to the music that many young folks are hearing today? Some of it is nerve-jamming in nature and much of it has been deliberately designed to promote revolution, dope, immorality, and a gap between parent and child. And some of this music has invaded our Church cultural halls.Have you noticed some of our Church dances lately? Have they been praiseworthy, lovely, and of good report? (Article of Faith 13.) "I doubt," said President McKay, "whether it is possible to dance most of the prevalent fad dances in a manner to meet LDS standards."
Author: Ezra Taft Benson

19. "Artists are taught to be humble about their impact, especially in folk music. It's so ingrained that I have a hard time even thinking I had any impact other than what a normal hit song would have."
Author: Janis Ian

20. "I sing a mixture of everything from opera, folk music, Broadway. It's a mix of things."
Author: Katherine Jenkins

21. "You could look out the window today, see the sky raining fire, and say that it has all been for nothing, everything we've ever done, because now we've lost. But folk were born and lived and knew friendship and music in this city, ugly as it is, and all across this land that we fought for. Some grew old, and others were less lucky. Many bore children and raised them, and had the pleasure of making them, too, and we gave them that for as long as we could. Who has ever done more, my friend?"
Author: Laini Taylor

22. "I guess my favorite artists are The White Stripes or Tom Waits. The more theatrical the music is, the more I get into it. I also like the quieter folk music, that kind of old-school rockabilly or country. I'm not really picky when it comes to music, as long as it's honest."
Author: Landon Liboiron

23. "I love a lot of music that's considered folk music, but I also love a lot of music that's considered punk or considered rap. I don't mind being called a folk singer. But it seems a bit limiting. I want to be able to write whatever kind of song I want."
Author: Langhorne Slim

24. "If someone asked what kind of music I play, I wouldn't say I'm a folk singer; however, if folk music means music for the people, and playing music to entertain them and share different messages, then sure, I'd like to think that I'm part folk singer."
Author: Langhorne Slim

25. "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."
Author: Louis Armstrong

26. "Have you ever listened to folk music? Let's face it, a lot of folk music is all about dead sailors, mad witches, rape and fratricide."
Author: Marie Browne

27. "Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new ?ery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale's rescuer, the form's own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter")"
Author: Marina Warner

28. "My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues."
Author: Mark Knopfler

29. "He helped make Living Things even more crazy than I wanted it to be. He added old-fashioned piano and classical folk music - that weird otherworldly vibe - all these elements got onto the record."
Author: Matthew Sweet

30. "And you know, we'd go to church. We were Baptists. And every now and then there'd be a tent would set up, and it was the Holiness folks. And we liked their music."
Author: Mel Tillis

31. "I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music."
Author: Melora Hardin

32. "When we moved back to the US, folk music was all the rage. So I traded in my banjo for a guitar."
Author: Michael Storm

33. "People don't listen to one radio station. On iTunes you can mix different worlds and bring country and pop and folk and live music together with a mass audience. I could have sung 'Easy' in a country way but I just sang it how I sing. I think it's a really nice blend."
Author: Natasha Bedingfield

34. "This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it."
Author: Neil Gaiman

35. "Jazz is the folk music of the machine age."
Author: Paul Whiteman

36. "I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music."
Author: Renee Fleming

37. "Kids don't think about their folks nearly as much as everybody imagines. Parents are just there, like background music at the mall."
Author: Ron Koertge

38. "Music was in the air when I was growing up. My siblings Katy, Dave and Phil were musical; my dad worked in inner-city New York where a musical revolution was taking place - folk music, rock n' roll, gospel music. My sister taught me to sing. My brothers taught me to play."
Author: Sam Barry

39. "Cornwall has lots of folk and Celtic music and has that kind of surfer vibe as well. That was my kind of upbringing."
Author: Sam Palladio

40. "You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture."
Author: Sonny Terry

41. "I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child."
Author: Stephen Stills

42. "Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world."
Author: Sufjan Stevens

43. "Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan—punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish."
Author: Terri Windling

44. "I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot of music that I don't like... except for Show Tunes."
Author: Terri Windling

45. "When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music."
Author: Tom Glazer

46. "Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue."
Author: Tom Morello

47. "I came late to the genre of folk music."
Author: Tom Morello

48. "White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies."
Author: Tom Robbins

49. "Now I shall speak of evil as none hasSpoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;The white-hosed moron torturing a blackBull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

50. "TO SOME I HAVE TALKED WITH BY THE FIREWHILE I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,My heart would brim with dreams about the timesWhen we bent down above the fading coalsAnd talked of the dark folk who live in soulsOf passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;And of the wayward twilight companiesWho sigh with mingled sorrow and content,Because their blossoming dreams have never bentUnder the fruit of evil and of good:And of the embattled flaming multitudeWho rise, wing above wing, flame above flame,And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,And with the clashing of their sword-blades makeA rapturous music, till the morning breakAnd the white hush end all but the loud beatOf their long wings, the flash of their white feet."
Author: W.B. Yeats

Folk Music Quotes Pictures