Old-Time Music Quotes

Bluegrass is really a big part of my background.

Since the beginning, the people of the college and I have agreed that the music of MerleFest is 'traditional plus.'

I don't really know what 'folk music' means anymore.

I was brought up on listening to 78 rpm records from crooners to opera singers to solo piano players.

I've always liked country music. It's a certain aspect of America that goes back to the British Isles and the influence is very native to America.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

I know there's some kind of history to mountain music-like it came from Ireland or England or Scotland and we kept up the tradition.

Ralph Stanley is like an uncle to us and now that all my uncles are gone, Ralph's singing is even more precious. This album of classic folk songs is one of his best.

I never get tired of exploring Americana or country music, and I always have a little bit of a crooner in me that never seems to go away.

My grandmother had always played show tunes from classic musicals at the piano when we were growing up, so that helped me fall in love with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, etc.

I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.

There are a whole lot of Carter Family songs.

The first music I remember hearing was the traditional songs of Kentucky - things like 'Roll Along Kentucky Moon.'

I like for it to be mountain music or old-time country music or traditional bluegrass. Either one will fit me. It's traditional, basically.

I also like the banging piano - that old good-time piano.

My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.

When I think of folk music, I think of topical songs. And I don't write topical songs.

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

A lot of my friends, they think I grew up to rock and roll, but I didn't. I grew up to Hank Williams, Jimmy Reid, Howlin' Wolf, listening to a race record, blues.

This is the bunch of songs I did first, and it's just the type of thing I do. I am a Carter Family girl, so the record is book-ended with Carter Family songs.

Call me a relic, call me what you will, say I'm old fashion, say I'm over the hill. Today's music ain't got the same soul, I like that old time rock and roll.

I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.

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.

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.

Mostly I listen to old-time music, some bluegrass, some Americana stuff, too many to name. But of the younger acts, there are The Freight Hoppers, who were big in the '90s, and The Foghorn Stringband from Oregon, and there's a lot of young string bands coming up now, basically punkers who play acoustic instruments forming new bands.