A Folk Song Quotes

#1. Then it is about sex," said Polly flatly. "It's a folk song, it starts with 'twas,' it takes place in May, QED, it's about sex. Is a milkmaid involved? I bet she is.

Terry Pratchett

#2. It was Rick's Rubin idea to have the 'Brooklyn' verse repeat. It already was a story, but having that made it a folk song. Instead of this rambling march of verses, Rick understands that music needs hooks. You need that repeated chorus, that everyone can sing along to.

Scott Avett

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#6. My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's 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

#7. She was humming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out - a folk song? a lullabye? - and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.

Gillian Flynn

#8. If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song

Oscar Isaac

#9. Hah!" said Granny Weatherwax. "I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about ... cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about ... something else entirely," she added darkly.

Terry Pratchett

#10. 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

#11. 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.

Janis Ian

#12. When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.

Jonathan Lethem

#13. Folk music is not so much a body of art as it is a process, an attitude, and a way of life; its distinguishing features lie not within the songs themselves, but in the relations of those songs to a folk culture.

Sam Hinton

#14. It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song.

Bruce Sterling

#15. 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

#16. I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.

Frank Black

#17. Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: 'The mother of folklore is poverty.'3

Rob Young

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

Joni Mitchell

#19. Once upon a winter I met a man in the woods The man beckoned me over To see a satchel of goods He offered three wishes I asked for beauty, love, riches And he froze me in stone where I stood. - "The Greedy Ghost of Cypress Pass," common folk song

Marie Lu

#20. I'm not a folk or jazz singer, more a hard-edged pop singer - with some rock, and song hooks.

Phoebe Snow

#21. You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.

H.G.Wells

#22. I'm really sick of anthems. Every song has to be a very big singalong thing - it feels very Eighties. There are a lot of 'whoah whoa whoahs,' this stadium thing. You're even getting that from some of the 'folk' groups. I can't stand it.

Oscar Isaac

#23. 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

#24. I grew up around music. My father was a professional musician. We used to have a trailer house that we travelled in. I've always loved music. Started out loving to sing to the standards and songs of the early 50s, then that interest shifted to rock and roll, Motown, folk.

Timothy B. Schmit

#25. 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

#26. Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money to make sure that everyone hears this song a certain number of times a day - that feels like the opposite of folk music.

Will Sheff

#27. In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.

Jerry Garcia

#28. 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

#29. I leaned my back against an oak Thinking it was a trusty tree. But first it bent, And then it broke And let me down as my love did me. - "The Water Is Wide," traditional folk song

Jill Barnett

#30. What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

Justin Townes Earle

#31. When it's a folk festival, there's more of an intention on the song and connecting with people.

Jenny O.

#32. holy scripture was believed to justify her subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey a

Elaine Morgan

#33. I make up cassettes all the time - to take on the road with me - a song from this album, a song from that album. That's the way I listen to music; it's like one of those K Tel things: it's from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads.

Robert Palmer

#34. subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey a horse gone wonky.' Throughout most of the

Elaine Morgan

#35. 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.

Langhorne Slim

#36. 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

#37. It's like a little folk song. I think it might've been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And "Merry Christmas, Everybody" by Slade, which is a rock group - a rock-pop group who are very big over there.

Nick Lowe

#38. I took the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face from a folk singer called Bonnie Dobson. I knew her and she had a record with that track on it.

Gordon Lightfoot

#39. So them who can't learn from a tale about critters, just ain't got the ears tuned to listen."
-Uncle Remus in Disney's Song of the South

Jim Korkis

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

Louis Armstrong

#41. 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

#42. as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey

Elaine Morgan

#43. There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.

John Lennon

#44. 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