Top 100 American Music Quotes
#1. We're a gumbo of American music, and aren't ashamed to play pop or soul or rock because we all grew up on radio.
Jonathan Cain
#2. 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
#3. Hip hop is the new rock n' roll, you know what I mean? And anybody who doesn't think that is just sort of living in the past. It's all just American music, really, when you get right down to it.
Dan Auerbach
#4. My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.
Barry Manilow
#5. American music is something the rest of the world wants to listen to. Our job is to make sure they pay for it.
Jason Michael Berman
#6. It is a rare American who does not have some story about how music has made our lives richer and more interesting, how it has changed our moods, brought out the best in our character and even sometimes helped us earn a living.
Lamar Alexander
#7. We are living in a time when American popular music is finally being recognized as one of our most successful exports. The demand is huge.
Billy Joel
#8. I don't want to be the cliche American Idol dude. I want to be different, you know - that's the whole goal, me and music. It's about being yourself and being unique.
Paul McDonald
#9. When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big.
Jonas Carpignano
#10. The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.
Pete Seeger
#11. I'm weird - I don't really listen to American music while I'm writing. I do occasionally get an anthem song, but generally speaking, when I write, I only listen to Japanese and Hawaiian music.
Violet Duke
#12. I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard.
Louis Tomlinson
#13. Here we go again. Pandering to the .3 percent of the American population that consider themselves transgender. Now I get to explain this to my 8-year-old, if I just wanted to watch a nice family show with some nice music.
Gretchen Carlson
#14. When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.
Clint Eastwood
#15. One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
Herbie Hancock
#16. I'd be happy if people said that I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.
Ahmet Ertegun
#17. Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided
with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.
P. J. O'Rourke
#18. New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did spread overland.
Ned Sublette
#19. I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music.
Gillian Welch
#20. The office of President is a great one; to every true American it seems the greatest on earth. And to me, as I was engaged in weaving a background of music for the pageantry of it, there came a deeper realization of the effect of that office on the man.
John Philip Sousa
#21. I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.
Kurt Cobain
#22. The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.
Amiri Baraka
#23. I'm still trying to make it. I'm still trying to get this over and do it and hopefully leave some kind of a mark on the course of American music, particularly in the tradition of what you might call the singer-songwriter.
Steve Forbert
#24. Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.
Van Morrison
#25. I always loved bluegrass, but there was so much I didn't know about American country music in respect to the origins of this country. It was interesting to see the evolution of it.
Clare Bowen
#26. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#27. He revolutionized music videos. Before Michael Jackson, MTV refused to play African-American artists.
Spike Lee
#28. I never set out now to get a Grammy, or get an American Music Award, but it still is nice to be recognized.
Ginuwine
#29. The one thing I'm really the most confident in as an artist is my songwriting ability and ear for pop music. I'm really excited to show that off. It was a side that I wasn't able to show on 'American Idol.'
Nick Fradiani
#30. I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.
Ian Anderson
#31. I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.
James Taylor
#32. My favorite type of music to sing and to listen to, you know, rock. It's not always metal, but you know, half the time it is. Metal's cool, you know? Not everybody on 'American Idol' listens to metal.
James Durbin
#33. Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.
Alexis Korner
#34. Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.
Michael Tippett
#35. I was into playing American music, especially the blues.
Mark Knopfler
#36. Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.
Henry Rollins
#37. Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.
Wesley Morris
#38. Music definitely gave me a focus. I was an artist without an outlet. Let's just say if I was not famous, I could have been infamous. I could've had my own episode of 'American Gangster.'
CeeLo Green
#39. Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.
Dave Grohl
#40. To be honest, I'm really into folk music, and I love Big Phony. I like Priscilla Ahn, and yeah, I really support Asian-American artists.
Justin Chon
#41. I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.
Dave Grohl
#42. I wanted a trumpet concerto that reflected Native American music because, well, there aren't any. I looked around for one but couldn't find anything. So it's a wide-open field.
Christopher Moore
#44. I was part of punk's second generation, so, not the first wave of '70s punk, but the American hardcore scene. I had a really strong love for music prior to that, but punk created a new template.
Bucky Pope
#45. Then think of fire, It's laughter, the music of splintering beams and glass, The flames reaching through the second story of a house almost as if to -mistakenly- rescue someone who left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us. It's desolation. And it's eventual, brief triumph.
Larry Levis
#46. You know, every country needs another country to mock, and Australians seem to be pretty good at impersonating American people. Maybe it's because all the movies and music and TV you see there is from America, so we just have the knack for it.
Callan McAuliffe
#47. I forsee a marked deterioration in American musicand a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue - or rather by vice - of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines
John Philip Sousa
#48. It was interesting to find how dominating American vision is all over the world. I think there's something to be said about the world's mindset and its economics and all of that, and I think it affects the way we see ourselves and it affects music.
K'naan
#49. American Ballet Theatre's rehearsal studios are at 890 Broadway, an old building where exposed pipes clank and hiss in uneven accompaniment to piano music. The high ceilings wear a toupee of dust. The wall paint peels like a newbie ballerina's toes.
Sascha Radetsky
#50. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.
David Simon
#51. Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.
Jorma Kaukonen
#52. It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.
Marcus Samuelsson
#53. The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I'm not going to die.
Courtney Love
#54. 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.
Barry McGuire
#55. I grew up with the Blind Boys' music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
Ben Harper
#56. I didn't like any British music before The Beatles. For me, it was all about black American music. But then I became a successful pop singer, even though the kind of music I liked was more elitist, which is what I'm trying to get back to.
Lulu
#57. I've built a solid career there, but America's ten times the size. Now that we're onto the third record, I feel like the stars have aligned and American audiences are embracing my music even more.
Chantal Kreviazuk
#58. My granddad was an evangelist, and my grandma, she was as tough as nails. She watched 'American Bandstand' every day when she was in her 80s, 90s. She loved rock music. I never had anyone in my family that was anti-rock n' roll.
Alice Cooper
#59. The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#60. I've hosted the Soul Train awards, the American Music Awards ... and I had my own talk show. So if I can't host by now, what the hell can I do?
Queen Latifah
#61. Think about the number of people who do film music, make records and have a Native American heritage - and I may be the only one on the list.
Robbie Robertson
#62. 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.
Alan Lomax
#63. My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including 4th of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand.
Frederick Reines
#64. It's a really unfair world because life is, where I am; all day long we listen to American music. So I don't see why the radios in the U.S. cannot even put aside one hour a day just to play music that is not American.
Miriam Makeba
#65. I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.
Ben Mendelsohn
#66. I have undeniable evidence that many have awakened as a result of my raising hell. Raising hell is SO American rock-and-roll. And of course even soulless wimps love killer music and my incredible guitar tone.
Ted Nugent
#67. Ray Charles, in his own way, it's like at the beginning, Ray Charles changed American music, not once but twice.
Taylor Hackford
#68. I talk about life, and I make universal music with an American style - and that's what I do.
Nas
#69. I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
Brian Eno
#70. Ray Gomez is truly an unsung hero in American music.
Stanley Clarke
#71. Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
Terry Teachout
#72. There will never be another 'American Idol,' which produced so many credible superstars over the years. It was a phenomenon in pop culture. It changed music.
Nick Fradiani
#74. This is black superhero music right here, baby!
Jay-Z
#75. But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn't be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians, who are imprisoned behind these bars; music's got these bars and measures you know.
Sun Ra
#76. What I consider to be the barometer for what is a rock artist and what is not, is somebody who has a certain element of blues, even a hint of soul or blues music, derivative of African-American blues, folk, spiritual, or gospel.
Ian Astbury
#77. Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American.
Wynton Marsalis
#78. Seattle's Moraine not only make Washington State proud, but also the whole American progressive music scene joyful ... It's simply an impressive dead on eleven song tour de force ... GET THIS! Highly Recommended!
Lee Henderson
#79. I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.
David Toop
#80. And I have a dream of a New American Language, one with a little bit more Spanish. I have a dream of a new pop music, that tells the truth with a good beat and some nice harmonies.
Dan Bern
#81. You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.
Eric Burdon
#82. I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.
Nick Lowe
#83. I'm not talking about Russia in my music. I've never been to Russia. I'm not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China. I'm talking about me being American and growing up in a crazy world and helping to reflect all different sides of life.
Nas
#85. I think what we took away from first hearing about the punk stuff in England and then the early American punk stuff was a sense of self-definition and also sort of playing music for music's sake and being part of a family for family's sake.
Ian MacKaye
#86. It's not just hip-hop that's dead. Mostly every form of American music is dead. It's been dead. R&B isn't really good.
Nas
#87. Most of the best music in American history was made by people with no options.
Isaac Brock
#88. 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.
Terri Windling
#89. It could be the sort of declining grip of the American MTV-nation culture-the fact that MTV doesn't play so much music anymore.
M.I.A.
#90. American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.
Rokia Traore
#91. The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It's all an online business now, and that's, you know - the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we're very reluctant to see go away.
Jonathan Galassi
#92. The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.
Willie Dixon
#93. I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
Carlisle Floyd
#94. It seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theater ... it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.
Kurt Weill
#95. Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.
Aaron Copland
#96. In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.
Michael Stipe
#97. I love collecting; my joy is finding private press American or European home studio electronic music from the 60s and 70s.
Keith Fullerton Whitman
#98. When it comes to African Americans and African American actors, Hollywood has always felt that if you can make us laugh, that's fine, but we don't need to see you do a 'Schindler's List,' where there's no jokes or music or comedic through-line.
Hill Harper
#99. Dick Clark's 'American Bandstand' spread the gospel of American pop music and teenage style that transcended the regional boundaries of our country and united a youth culture that eventually spread its message throughout the entire world.
John Oates
#100. I know I'm an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I'm not a jazz musician. I'm not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It's in between these areas.
Anthony Braxton
