Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have that storytelling history in country and bluegrass and old time and folk music, blues - all those things that combine to make up the genre. It was probably storytelling before it was songwriting, as far as country music is concerned. It's fun to be a part of that and tip the hat to that. You know, and keep that tradition alive.

Folk music - and what people are now perceiving as being folk music - is music that's quite close to the ground. The songs sound quite old, even if they're new. They sound like they've been sung by different people for years.

Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.

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

I love folk; that's a big part of my background.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

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.

I have a very musical family from my Scottish roots.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest 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.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

My grandmother valued her Southern roots, folk culture, and healing.

I traveled to a library in South Africa called ILAM (International Library of African Music), which has a collection of about 500 different instruments that don't really exist anymore.

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."

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