Quotes About Folk Songs

#1. 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

#2. But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

Roger McGuinn

#3. 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

#4. I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.

Tom Lehrer

#5. I like folk songs, but ten horses couldn't bring me to a concert or an opera.

Fritz Lang

#6. Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.

Bonnie Raitt

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

H.G.Wells

#8. You can't trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.

Terry Pratchett

#9. 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

#10. From chain gangs to folk songs to intelligent soul, America has created musicians dedicated to truth, justice, and a better American Way.

Shawn Amos

#11. 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

#12. Anything that anybody wants to give me is great! I've had folk songs, heavy metal songs, jewellery ... I would never call anything any fan gives me weird, as it's how people express what they like about the books, what it means to them, and that's a wonderful thing.

Patrick Ness

#13. There was a time that I was only known for being a plagiarist. It used to hurt at times because there was so much effort I was putting into music. And instead of that, it was a couple tunes that I had reproduced from folk songs to remake as film songs, which were being written about.

Pritam Chakraborty

#14. My mum's family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.

Dan Auerbach

#15. People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education.

David Soul

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. I once told him that the best way to break up a fight is to step between the two people and start singing ancient folk songs. But I'd never heard of anyone actually doing such a thing.

David Levithan

#21. There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them.

Eugene Chadbourne

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing 'em.

Big Bill Broonzy

#25. 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

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

Jean Toomer

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

Noam Chomsky

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

Oscar Isaac

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. The first music I was ever exposed to was Irish folk music, like the Clancy Brothers. My father plays that and Christmas songs.

Matt Dillon

#36. At last came the golden month of the wild folk-- honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the dawning year.

Samuel Scoville Jr.

#37. I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.

Joanna Newsom

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.

Barry McGuire

#41. My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.

David Crosby

#42. I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.

Bob Dylan

#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. It's one of those songs that everybody knows, but you are not supposed to do, because everyone does it, only no-one does it, because you're not supposed to do it, because everyone does it....if you follow that....

Gloria Jackson

#45. I went to school for folk music back when I was a teenager and learned hundreds of songs.

Roger McGuinn

#46. Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.

Brownie McGhee

#47. 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

#48. From a young age, I was encouraged to sing, dance and learn folk and popular songs in Spanish.

Ailyn Perez

#49. When I think of folk music, I think of topical songs. And I don't write topical songs.

Ray Lamontagne

#50. 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

#51. I fell in love with folk music at Surprise Lake Camp. It was the songs of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers.

Neil Diamond

#52. That's one of the things I like best about folk music is the beautiful melodies - and the harmonies - that exist in it. And of course, some of the stories, the story songs.

Roger McGuinn

#53. You've got to go down the road you naturally go down, and for me it was pop, folk country, just feel-good music. I suppose most of my songs are very up-tempo.

Shane Filan

#54. 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

#55. 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