Bernice Johnson Reagon Quotes

The protest songs of the 1960s and 70s managed to blend political and societal views with music from the heart.

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it's very possible that one influenced the other.

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn't have happened without the social changes.

Dylan captured what was on a million minds and turned it into poetry. With 'Blowin' in the Wind' or 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' he set a whole new standard.

Music can't change the world.

I can't exactly say why there's not much protest music to speak off. And I know there are acts out there still putting a message in their music.

A lot of young musicians in Stockholm are about keeping tradition alive and moving it forward at the same time.

Pop music has progressed.

Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Bob Dylan was more important for my political orientation than Karl Marx.

Nobody thought that the music boom of the Sixties was going to last.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

In the '60s and '70s, a protest song was a genre in music.

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it . . . and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy.

The times they are a-changing.

As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

Back then I was still listening to rhythm and blues, and my aunt took me to see a Pete Seeger concert. And it gelled. He made all the sense in the world to me. I got addicted to his albums, and then Belafonte and Odetta - they were the people who seemed to fuse things that were important to me into music. I think Pete the most because he did what he did to the point where he took those enormous risks and then paid for them.

I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.

When I first moved to London, there was talk of a folk revival, with annoying names like nu-folk that made me feel slightly ill.

Time will change and with it music will too. Our speed has changed, clothes have changed, food habits have changed, so why should music remain the same?