Musical Preservation Quotes

It's a wonderful thing to be able to see your music going from generation to generation.

And there are certain songs that are really timepieces and shouldn't be touched. But some of them are a celebration of good humour and sensibility and I think that's okay. I don't care about the past, I'm a musician with ambition.

I came up in Brooklyn singing doo-wop music from the time I was 13 to the time I was 20. That music served a purpose of keeping a lot of people out of trouble, and also it was a passport from one neighborhood to another.

Music comes from the soul. It's a way to express yourself, so we always, always need to save the music.

I'm very much a traditionalist, but I think it's important to know about tradition so that you can evolve the music you are deciding to make.

I've always had something turning in my brain. And it got to a point where I felt it was stupid to let some of the tunes die. So I began putting them down on paper.

Music is fragile: people die, and it's forgotten.

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

I do feel I'm responsible to carrying on the music. That's what I was charged with as a kid. When I was a little girl, I was told, 'When we are gone' - when you're a kid, you never think they'll ever be gone - 'you have to keep the music alive, the Carter Family songs, and add your own songs.'

I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.

When I did 'Unforgettable,' it wasn't appropriate for us to take liberties with that music. There had to be kind of a fine line between what had made it so great and the fact that a woman was singing it. We changed some of the arrangements, but not too much.

We've always prided ourselves on making a record that we want to feel proud of, ones that are hopefully timeless so they can be around for a long time.

Whenever I hear somebody cover a song, I don't like to hear it stray too far from the original. I like to hear some of the new energy that a band will put into it, but you kind of want to hear some of the basic parts of the song. I mean, that's what makes it the song that you like.

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

I've always respected and taken care of my instrument.

Presenting the American songbook as a living, breathing entity that's expanding all the time is very important.

There are certain songs that are sacred. People want to hear them just as they are in their head; they don't want you messing around with them. And then there are some other songs, if they've been around a long time in our set list, that I think we can take some creative liberties with.

Sometimes, with vocalese, I'm dealing with something, a great solo from the past, which is so iconic I can't presume to change it or mess with it.

With a band like Shenandoah, you don't want to take things and deconstruct them to a point where you don't recognize them.

You have those songs that are very special to you that you don't want to get ruined by production. Something like 'Start Again' shouldn't be touched. It's a classic-sounding song on a piano and violins and harmonies, and I think those songs are perfect as they are.

When you write and make music, there's a tendency to save stuff... to be cagey, to be savvy.

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.

I tend to feel really protective of songs, and if they aren't sitting well in a record, I'll pull them tight to my chest until I feel it's a better time.

I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.