Top 70 Folk Song Quotes

#1. We enjoyed the fact that we were called to the folk festivals and we got to know Joan Baez, Dylan. We were singing strictly gospel, but then after we started hearing songs that they would sing, we saw that those songs were very fitting for us because they were singing the truth, and truth is gospel.

Mavis Staples

Folk Song Quotes #10300
#2. People sing each other's songs and they cultivate standards. That's the reason why we have folk music and folk stories. History is told through song.

Brandi Carlile

Folk Song Quotes #19612
#3. 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

Folk Song Quotes #29889
#4. 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

Folk Song Quotes #59454
#5. 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

Folk Song Quotes #127645
#6. When it's a folk festival, there's more of an intention on the song and connecting with people.

Jenny O.

Folk Song Quotes #172894
#7. 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

Folk Song Quotes #174418
#8. Ralph Stanley is like an uncle to us and now that all my uncles are gone, Ralph's singing is even more precious. This album of classic folk songs is one of his best.

Garrison Keillor

Folk Song Quotes #227701
#9. 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

Folk Song Quotes #279626
#10. 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

Folk Song Quotes #299671
#11. I fell in love with folk music at Surprise Lake Camp. It was the songs of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers.

Neil Diamond

Folk Song Quotes #303018
#12. Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?

Milan Kundera

Folk Song Quotes #370387
#13. 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

Folk Song Quotes #372811
#14. I lived in London in 1965 and 1972. I love it there and I'm always very creative in that vibe. Would love to live for awhile in Scotland/Ireland and Britain. Great appreciation there for the folk scene and song crafting.

Creed Bratton

Folk Song Quotes #431740
#15. 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

Folk Song Quotes #433186
#16. Be serious. Folk songs are serious. That's what Pete Seeger told me. Arlo, I only wanna tell you one thing. Folk songs are serious. And I said Right.

Arlo Guthrie

Folk Song Quotes #463559
#17. 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

Folk Song Quotes #514184
#18. 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

Folk Song Quotes #541311
#19. 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

Folk Song Quotes #542822
#20. 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

Folk Song Quotes #563921
#21. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

Bob Dylan

Folk Song Quotes #567629
#22. 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

Folk Song Quotes #570405
#23. 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

Folk Song Quotes #579284
#24. 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

Folk Song Quotes #600235
#25. All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

Louis Armstrong

Folk Song Quotes #685776
#26. 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

Folk Song Quotes #685789
#27. 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

Folk Song Quotes #690308
#28. Some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

Jean Toomer

Folk Song Quotes #710152
#29. 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

Folk Song Quotes #720671
#30. 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

Folk Song Quotes #735813
#31. 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

Folk Song Quotes #785073
#32. 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

Folk Song Quotes #790301
#33. 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

Folk Song Quotes #805048
#34. 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

Folk Song Quotes #817704
#35. Bare Foot Folk and is full of really interesting songs, Ange Hardy takes folk tales and creates new folk songs that sound traditional around the story. This is one she's called mother willow tree, it's beautiful

Mike Harding

Folk Song Quotes #846877
#36. Small towns blossomed by elevators and the trains
Once every 14 miles along the prairie veins
We were born of progress, now progress will decree
That we're no longer viable, and should no long be ...
Still Standing about Canada's Prairie Elevators (The First Song album)

Phyllis Wheaton

Folk Song Quotes #852094
#37. 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

Folk Song Quotes #856237
#38. 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

Folk Song Quotes #872769
#39. 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

Folk Song Quotes #883073
#40. 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

Folk Song Quotes #955497
#41. If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song

Oscar Isaac

Folk Song Quotes #1005834
#42. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1024173
#43. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1154042
#44. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1165463
#45. reality has too many heads

Bob Dylan

Folk Song Quotes #1204030
#46. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1234913
#47. I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.

Frank Black

Folk Song Quotes #1265407
#48. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1277897
#49. Coming, as I do, from mountain folk on one side and sea followers on the other, there are few old songs of the hills or the sea with which I am not familiar.

Robert E. Howard

Folk Song Quotes #1286421
#50. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1299783
#51. That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

Jackson Browne

Folk Song Quotes #1315932
#52. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1356558
#53. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1358774
#54. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1364137
#55. Deaf folk hear the fairies However soft their song; 'Tis we who lose the honey sound Amid the clamor all around That beats the whole day long.

Rose Fyleman

Folk Song Quotes #1399822
#56. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1414216
#57. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1430419
#58. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1460815
#59. I'm not a folk or jazz singer, more a hard-edged pop singer - with some rock, and song hooks.

Phoebe Snow

Folk Song Quotes #1525692
#60. You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.

H.G.Wells

Folk Song Quotes #1624287
#61. I think folk music helps reinforce your sense of history. An old song makes you think of times gone by.

Pete Seeger

Folk Song Quotes #1665164
#62. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1675864
#63. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Alan Lomax

Folk Song Quotes #1753273
#64. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1758123
#65. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1788585
#66. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1792518
#67. And so the Wolf of the West rose from the stone! And so he will rise again if ever the folk of the Six Duchies call to him in need.

Robin Hobb

Folk Song Quotes #1801710
#68. The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world - - the cowboy songs of Texas and the West - - are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses.

J. Frank Dobie

Folk Song Quotes #1839461
#69. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1851847
#70. 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

Folk Song Quotes #1868262

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