Quotes About Bluegrass

#1. I base my roots and history in old blues, old country and old bluegrass, and I like rock 'n' roll, and somehow it all came together, and that is what I am playing now.

Tyler Hilton

#2. My dad's a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player - he's a bluegrass musician. It's always been a part of the family.

Timothy Simons

#3. My gift's primarily literary. That being said, I ended up a musician. By the time I made the bluegrass record ... I'm more impressed with myself when I push the envelope musically than I am when I push it literality.

Steve Earle

#4. I don't really have a favorite bass player. I listen to a lot of bluegrass. But then again, I'm not a typical bluegrass bass player. I was really into the Grateful Dead, and I still am - I don't listen to them too much, but for me they are a big influence.

Mike Gordon

#5. Being from New York, I wonder why am I inspired by bluegrass and Earl Scruggs? But when I look at the whole history of the banjo, I feel really good about it, including the Earl Scruggs part.

Bela Fleck

#6. Bluegrass is really a big part of my background.

Travis Tritt

#7. All of the plants that we do not consider food that are safe for the human body to digest, we don't eat because they're sour and bitter. The reason why you don't eat Kentucky bluegrass or crabgrass is because it tastes sour and bitter.

Homaro Cantu

#8. The music has to come from bluegrass first. We always said back in the 70s that if you want to play newgrass you have to go through the school of bluegrass. You know, maybe Jack Black can make a movie now called School of Bluegrass . That would be cool.

Sam Bush

#9. I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.

Steve Martin

#10. There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.

Daniel Hope

#11. I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it's not part of the musical mainstream anymore.

Steve Earle

#12. Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world. You meet people at festivals and renew acquaintances year after year.

Bill Monroe

#13. I wouldn't call myself a woman in bluegrass. I haven't really been a part of the world for a while. It's just been a big influence on who I am today.

Sara Watkins

#14. I was in a bluegrass band. I made two records with a band called the SteelDrivers. They were nominated for two Grammys. I then I was in a rock band called the Junction Brothers; we made kind of '70s hard rock music.

Chris Stapleton

#15. Some musicians play blues, others classical jazz or bluegrass. I like to play political roles because I can merge my political interests with my creative interests.

Jeffrey Wright

#16. 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

#17. All along, I did what I was comfortable doing, which was to play the music I enjoyed and try to stretch the parameters a bit. Country and bluegrass and folk were my foundation.

Chris Hillman

#18. When you're a kid, you listen to what your family is listening to. For my family, it was bluegrass.

Sara Watkins

#19. When I hear bluegrass today, I hear so many new sounds in it. It's almost like country music in a way.

Ricky Skaggs

#20. I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.

Otis Rush

#21. I've always wanted to make a bluegrass album.

Alan Jackson

#22. The bluegrass community ... can be very strict. I didn't know if I'd be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly ... I felt really welcome.

Steve Martin

#23. I listen to and I play all kinds of music, and I'm interested in jazz and in bluegrass - I like it all - but Cuban music speaks to me in a certain way.

Andy Garcia

#24. I wanted to use some kind of name so people would know where I was from. So I took the name "bluegrass." There is not a prettier name in the whole world.

Bill Monroe

#25. The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

Randy Bachman

#26. That's what I love about Nashville and the music community - seeing kids around acoustic music and bluegrass picking parties is the best.

Dierks Bentley

#27. It was around that time, early 60s. There were like three kindred spirits in New Jersey. I had two friends who played folk music, old-time music and bluegrass and we started a little band called the Garret Mountain Boys.

David Grisman

#28. What music I listen to day to day changes very, very much. I can go from bluegrass to heavy metal, to blues, to classical and big band and then go to pop and rap.

Casey James

#29. I think the great country songs mixed with some of that bluegrass instrumentation - and surrounding all that with a little bit of a rock vibe and energy - is the kind of music I make.

Dierks Bentley

#30. There are so many people who've come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

Ada Limon

#31. People like bluegrass. It's had a following amongst a lot of hip and young people. A lot of college kids like bluegrass.

Dolly Parton

#32. I got to sing with Placido Domingo ... I got to sing with Aaron Neville, who is one of my favorites. Got to sing with Brian Wilson, one of the great high tenors. And Ricky Skaggs, a bluegrass tenor. I'm also proud of my musical friendship with Emmylou Harris.

Linda Ronstadt

#33. I listen to instrumental jazz and bluegrass, but aside from my AM workout, I have no rituals.

David B. Coe

#34. Bluegrass has a very, very strict musical form. Once you start to dilute it, it disappears.

Emmylou Harris

#35. I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.

Dan Auerbach

#36. I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.

Terry Teachout

#37. I had some good teachers. One of the greatest teachers I've had is bluegrass music: going back and listening to Bill Monroe's music, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs. When I was with Ralph Stanley I learned a lot from him.

Ricky Skaggs

#38. It doesn't matter if you stick the name 'bluegrass' on it. I think people call things bluegrass that I wouldn't necessarily call bluegrass, but what they're calling country music today I'm not sure that I would call country music. But I love music and I try to encourage people.

Ricky Skaggs

#39. A lot of great bluegrass comes out of Kentucky. There's a lot of great music, like the Judds, Billy Ray Cyrus, Ricky Skaggs, and Keith Whitley. There's a lot of bluegrass intertwined with country music.

Chris Stapleton

#40. I like big shows, a lot of volume and a lot of energy. I love electric instruments. But I do love mixing those with bluegrass instruments and cranking those up, too, with a little bit of that rock energy.

Dierks Bentley

#41. My mother's a singer and my mother's father is a singer, and everyone on both sides are all country-western bluegrass musicians.

Brandi Carlile

#42. Early Bluegrass is my favorite kind of music, not to many people know that.

John Fahey

#43. I like for it to be mountain music or old-time country music or traditional bluegrass. Either one will fit me. It's traditional, basically.

Ralph Stanley

#44. Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.

Edgar Meyer

#45. My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.

Deborah Moggach

#46. I was never into the Bluegrass, Bill Monroe and stuff like that.

Little Milton

#47. It is a really interesting to hear yourself on the radio. I've gotten to hear myself in different capacities. I've heard myself on Sirius XM on the bluegrass channels, and on WSM and other places.

Chris Stapleton

#48. I like all kinds of music. I listen to Abigail Washburn, the Punch Brothers, and Marc Johnson, the great clawhammer player. I also listen a lot to Sirius Radio, there's a lot of bluegrass there.

Steve Martin

#49. It seems like bluegrass people have more great stories to tell than other musicians.

Dan Fogelberg

#50. 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

#51. I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.

Bela Fleck

#52. Mike Compton knows more about Bill Monroe style mandolin than the Father of Bluegrass himself.

John Hartford

#53. I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.

Kent Haruf

#54. I've been writing a lot of country music again. I've written some bluegrass material. I'm having a good time doing that.

Dan Fogelberg

#55. Ireland and America, music-wise, are very closely related. The Irish came over with their fiddles in hand, and you can hear it in the bluegrass and rockabilly. I love it when music from different countries combine.

Imelda May

#56. If you looked at my iPod, you would get a trip out of all the different music, from the real heavy metal to bluegrass to classical.

Eric Close

#57. Bluegrass is wonderful music. I'm glad I originated it.

Bill Monroe

#58. Speaking of WAMU, [bluegrass and old time music DJ] Ray Davis did a lot of work there. I've know Ray, I guess for 50 years - 40, or 50 years. And, he plays a lot of my records.

Ralph Stanley

#59. I just hope bluegrass entertainers take care of their music and take care of their fans. If you don't practice, the man next door who is practicing will beat you.

Bill Monroe

#60. I'm just trying to unite the western crowd and the bluegrass crowd a little more ... I get to do that again on my new album, Tall Grass and Cool Water ... This is the first time I've had every song on an album be a Bluegrass and Cowboy Song at the same time.

Michael Martin Murphey

#61. Soon the Boov was in the ghost suit and Pig was in the car, which would be a good lyric for a bluegrass song, now that I think of it.

Adam Rex

#62. The grand old lady of bluegrass? Well, wouldn't that be a wonderful title to have? I hope I do enough to earn it some day.

Alison Krauss

#63. It's true that bluegrass is a virtuosic form and asks that of its performer. Old-time music is older rawer and purer. It's less stylized. We don't solo. Well sometimes we do, but it's different it has more to do with rock-and-roll than bluegrass does.

Ketch Secor

#64. I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.

Billy Collins

#65. It was so much fun playing simple American bluegrass. I got to meet Doc Watson.

Dan Fogelberg

#66. I think Earl Scruggs playing propelled bluegrass and Bill Monroe's music to the level that - where we're all still talking about it.

Earl Scruggs

#67. When I was playing bluegrass, I was living down in West Hollywood - starving.

Chris Hillman

#68. Although it was hard to tell, with bluegrass, wether or not they were supposed to sound like geese.

Sarah McCarry

#69. I like the idea of different
theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook
of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone.

Bob Hicok

#70. I have no doubt that most people who listen to Alison Krauss and say they like bluegrass have never heard real bluegrass played in the traditional manner, and probably don't even know who Bill Monroe is.

Mark O'Connor

#71. I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like 'Letterman' and 'The View,' and I've heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven't felt any negativity toward me or my music.

Steve Martin

#72. But, mark my words; someday she'll get what's coming to her. Karma's a bigger bitch than she is,

Kathleen Brooks