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. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I never set out now to get a Grammy, or get an American Music Award, but it still is nice to be recognized.
Ginuwine
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.
Alexis Korner
#15. I was into playing American music, especially the blues.
Mark Knopfler
#16. I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.
Dave Grohl
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Ray Charles, in his own way, it's like at the beginning, Ray Charles changed American music, not once but twice.
Taylor Hackford
#27. Ray Gomez is truly an unsung hero in American music.
Stanley Clarke
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. There is a definite Chinese pop sound developing, but I was shocked at how influenced it is by American music.
Paul Oakenfold
#38. I started with rock n' roll and ... then you start to take it apart like a child with a toy and you see there's blues and there's country ... Then you go back from country into American music ... and you end up in Scotland and Ireland eventually.
Elvis Costello
#39. My personal tastes ... I actually like quite a bit acoustic and more mellow kinds of things. I quite like American music, like The Fray, I'm a massive fan of them, and The Killers.
Louis Tomlinson
#40. One of the most memorable live performances of my career took place on the 2002 American Music Awards show when I had to the opportunity to sing with Elton John. I was moved by the way he played the piano onstage.
Tim McGraw
#41. I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.
Vera Farmiga
#42. Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
Wynton Marsalis
#43. At its best, American music is the soundtrack of our long - and often painful - march toward a more perfect union.
Shawn Amos
#44. The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.
B.B. King
#45. It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.
Bill Taylor
#46. I learned that instead of relying on and imitating American music, there is a better chance for an Asian artist to succeed if he or she follows his or her own culture.
Rain
#47. Britney and I wore matching denim outfits [to the 2001 American Music Awards]. Yeah, another bad choice. I'd probably pay good money to get some of those pictures off the internet.
Justin Timberlake
#48. The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
Virgil Thomson
#49. The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
Wynton Marsalis
#50. The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#51. The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.
Willie Dixon
#52. It's like there's the rest of the world, and then there's America. Part of the reason I would really love continue to making music over here because so much of American music has inspired me, whether it's Jeff Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.
Tom Odell
#53. Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
Ken Burns
#54. What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds.
Carlisle Floyd
#55. Grammys, American Music Awards, successful albums, I'd pick my kids any day over any of it.
Toni Braxton
#56. The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don't listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don't listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I'm going to see ... not, I'm going to hear.
Branford Marsalis
#57. Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.
Cassandra Wilson
#58. We're a staple in the American music culture. Like us or not, we're here to stay.
Jonathan Cain
#59. Paste may be the last great American music magazine left.
Patterson Hood
#60. The blues will always be because the blues are the roots of all American music.
Willie Dixon
#61. It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
James Weldon Johnson
#62. I joke to people in the press that I realize I'm not black, I'm actually white. But I've got these roots in black American music. I love it.
Glenn Hughes
#63. Irving Berlin has no place in American music
he is American music.
Jerome Kern
#64. I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.
Boz Scaggs
#65. I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
Burt Bacharach
#66. I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.
Wynton Marsalis
#67. To me, country music's about life. It's about Monday through Friday. It's the blue-collar, 40-hour week, songs about life. It used to have more of a sound, but I think the heart of that's still the same. It's still American music.
Gary Allan
#68. There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.
John Deacon
#69. I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.
Etta James
#71. 'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.
Kate Christensen
#72. Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
Robert Plant
#73. African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.
David Simon
#74. Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.
Johnny Otis
#75. The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.
Fredric Jameson
#76. My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.
Iggy Pop
#77. Patty Griffin is iconic, and there's no other word to really describe her. She is iconic for a lot of people - not only for me but for a lot of fans. Her voice is one of a kind, and she's such an important figure in the American music scene.
Dierks Bentley
#78. American music culture is black culture.
Yelawolf
#79. If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to.
Eric San
#80. It's called a gui-tar. It's used to perform American rural music. It's said to be especially popular in Texas, " he told her. "It's also the instrument of choice for playing 'the blues,' which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.
Adam Johnson
#81. 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
#82. My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.
Barry Manilow
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.
Van Morrison
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. He revolutionized music videos. Before Michael Jackson, MTV refused to play African-American artists.
Spike Lee
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.
Michael Tippett
