Folk Songs Quotes

• All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

  Louis Armstrong

  Funny, Music, Song

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 7 July 1971

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• If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs - don't pay any attention to its politicians.

  Agnes de Mille

  Dance, Song, Looks

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• In a way it's the emotional feeling that you get in a good rock song or folk song, there's just nothing that rivals that.

  Bryce Dessner

  Song, Emotional, Rocks

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• I always knew Gordon Lightfoot was a really great songwriter, but his stuff even sounds better and better all the time. It's just so really good to me. It's just like that's what should be in a dictionary, you know, next to a really good contempory folk song, is a Gordon Lightfoot song.

  John Prine

  Song, Sound, Stuff

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• When I do older folk songs, I'm not doing them because they're old. I have no interest in reviving or continuing a tradition. I'm just doing them because they're great songs.

  Sam Amidon

  Song, Tradition, Interest

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it or it could be
  who's hungry and where their mouth is or
  who's out of work and where the job is or
  who's broke and where the money is or
  who's carrying a gun and where the peace is.

  Woody Guthrie

  Song, Jobs, Gun

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• We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.

  Tom Lehrer

  Song, Peace, Hate

  Song: The Folk Song Army, Album: That Was the Year That Was

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• But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

  Roger McGuinn

  Song, People, Imagination

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• I was working for Alan Lomax in the Library of Congress folk song archive, and starting to realize what a wealth of different kinds of music there was in this country that you never heard on the radio.

  Pete Seeger

  Country, Song, Library

  Source: www.wholeearth.com

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• A professional entertainer who allows himself to become known as a singer of folk songs is bound to have trouble with his conscience provided, of course, that he possesses one. As a performing artist, he will pride himself on timing and other techniques designed to keep the audience in his control ... his respect for genuine folklore reminds him that these changes, and these techniques, may give the audience a false picture of folk music.

  Sam Hinton

  Song, Pride, Artist

  "The Singer of Folk Songs and His Conscience". Book by Sam Hinton, Western Folklore 14:3, p. 170 - 173, July 1955.

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• My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what its like. I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing Memory. I was terrible. Terrible.

  Emilia Clarke

  Girl, Song, Children

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• The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.

  Constant Lambert

  Song, Play, May

  'Music Ho!' (1934) ch. 3

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• The term 'popular culture' always used to mean what the people do - pop songs, folk songs, music in general used to live because people would sing these songs and tell these stories together. Then all of these new technologies came out and it became the work of professionals.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  Song, Mean, Technology

  Interview with Amy Kaufman, www.thewrap.com. October 7, 2010.

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• Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular."

  Pete Seeger

  Song, Father, Thinking

  Source: www.wholeearth.com

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• He [Alan Lomax] started right off trying to find people who could introduce folk songs to city people. He found a young actor named Burl Ives and said, "Burl, you know a lot of great country songs learned from your grandmother, don't you know people would love to hear them?" He put on radio programs. He persuaded CBS to dedicate "The School of the Air" for one year to American folk music. He'd get some old sailor to sing an old sea shanty with a cracked voice. Then he'd get me to sing it with my banjo.

  Pete Seeger

  Country, Song, School

  Source: www.wholeearth.com

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• If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song

  Oscar Isaac

  Song, Folks, Ifs

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• Robert Burns enriched Scottish song with his genius and is mainly responsible for the rich treasure house of song that we enjoy today. He collected folk songs, retained the melodic line, kept what words were usable and rewrote the rest. He didn't claim ownership.

  Jimmy Reid

  Song, House, Genius

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• Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Lying, Play

  Bob Dylan (2011). “Chronicles”, p.57, Simon and Schuster

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• some genius of the South
  With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
  Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

  Jean Toomer

  Song, Eye, Blood

  Jean Toomer (1988). “The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer”, p.27, UNC Press Books

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• My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

  Anne Waldman

  Song, Brother, Weekend

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.

  Ketch Secor

  Country, Song, White

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.

  John Lennon

  Song, Rocks, Rock And Roll

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I used to go to the school folk club with my songs when I was only 13 or so and say "this is a traditional folk song" and sing it with a bad Irish accent to disguise the real source.

  Mark Knopfler

  Song, Real, School

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• When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt so I was sort of a novice folkie... I was singing folk songs at that time.

  Joni Mitchell

  Song, Art, Teaching

  Interview with Joe Smith, jonimitchell.com. November 3, 1986.

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• There have always been people making music. On their porches, playing folk songs. Playing piano in quiet salons. You don't have to listen to every MySpace page, so what's the difference? It's just noise that you filter out.

  Tim Hecker

  Song, Piano, Differences

  Source: thequietus.com

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