Folk Culture Quotes

The 'Fargo' characters, they're the characters of my people. They're stoic, hardworking, uncomplaining, and I loved them.

I'm not one of those superstitious people.

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.

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

When country music is doing its job, it reports on the good, bad and indifferent of our human condition.

I'm pretty sure in my older years, I'll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

I did pretty good for a guy who never finished high school and used to yodel at square dances.

The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles.

Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing.

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 history of a nation is not in Parliaments and battlefields but in what people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm and quarrel and go on pilgrimage.

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

Folk music isn't owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It's our common property. There is nobody's name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It's not copywritten.

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

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

The British have a unique relationship with horses. They are etched into our landscape in chalk, they have been written about, painted, sung about, celebrated and gambled upon for centuries.

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.

Turkey's true master is the peasant.

We sing these songs for the everyday occasions of life, and they are very close to the hearts of our people.

I absolutely love American folk art, can't get enough of it.

You know, in Fairyland-Above they said that the underworld was full of devils and dragons. But it isn’t so at all! Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it’s only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body’s a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions. It’s wild and quick and bold down here, but I like wild things and quick things and bold things, too.

My mother played a little bit of the old time clawhammer. She tuned the banjo up and picked one tune for me, and it just become natural to me. When she picked it, I just started and picked it, too.

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.

Everybody knows this legend in kind of African-American lore. There's always somebody in your neighborhood named Orangejello or Lemonjello. And that's spelled - Orangejello is spelled O-R-A-N-G-E-J-E-L-L-O.