Brian Eno Quotes

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

More and more, I see myself as a folk musician, and someone who values context.

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."

Oral musical traditions are rooted in assured and scrupulous faith.

My father urged Alan [Lomax] not to repeat the mistakes of the European folklorists who, a century ago, had collected these peasant songs and then arranged them for part choir and accompanied them on piano, and then told the young people of their country, "Don't change a note, this is our sacred heritage." Father said, whether it's a fiddle tune or a gospel song, learn it right off the record from the people who grew up with it. Don't just learn it from a piece of paper.

Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.

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.

It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later.

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

How can I be a folk? I'm from the suburbs you know.

Mine is not a traditional music, but it comes from a tradition.

What I mean by being real is just when you are doing dance celebrations, sports celebrations, like the cooking dance or anything like that. When you're an artist, you want to always try your best to do the homework and see where it originated from.

We have to preserve folk in its authenticity. Else folk will become fake.

Traditional musical forms like 'Parai Isai' and 'Villupattu' are unique, and they need to be protected and nurtured.

The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else. The fact that no one has as yet arisen to make the most of it does not prove that nothing is there.

Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped.

Anne Romaine [ is ]folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field [of Malcolm X].

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.'

Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group.

There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

By giving our audience intimate access to the lives of musicians, we hope to raise awareness of the region's beautiful cultural heritage and present a more nuanced portrait of its people.

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.

Folk music has a sort of a bubbling-under quality. The stream runs through the cultural consciousness, and whether or not it's on the radio is not the issue. Folk music is always there.