Folk Music Revival Quotes

The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too.

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.

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.'

I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.

I don't think I have any right to say I belong to that [Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan tradition]. I think that's something that eventually maybe you get inducted into. I'm just experimenting.

In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.

Well, I don't think it ever did, but in the early '60s I got interested in folk music.

Bare Foot Folk and is full of really interesting songs, Ange Hardy takes folk tales and creates new folk songs that sound traditional around the story. This is one she's called mother willow tree, it's beautiful

There is a black folk music audience. They're just very small.

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Beatles was 20th-century folksong in the framework of capitalism; they couldn't do anything different if they wanted to communicate within that framework.