Hank Williams Quotes

Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

When you get to readin' about where the music and John Steinbeck and all those people like that come from, the further you go the more interesting it becomes.

I started singing because I come from Wales.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

The future will use and dispose of the memories of people that we knew as history sees fit.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

People were talking about songs of the common man in order to make the common man. With Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, they were so common it was just uncommon.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

I've had several working-man songs that I like.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

The working class owes all honor and respect to the first men who planted the standard of labor solidarity on the hostile frontier of unorganized industry.

I guess it kind of stemmed from my father. He was a union guy working for the meat plant down in Kansas City. He was a union guy, and I guess it was just in my blood.

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

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.