Traditional Singing Quotes

Every week, Dennis Day sang an old Irish folk song. And next day in the fields, I'd be singing that song if I was working in the fields.

Singing in Gaelic is very, very natural to do. I think lends itself very much so to being sung.

I have no desire to become a crossover artiste, singing with microphones. I believe in opera; that it is something that young people would love if they had a chance to hear it.

I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let's say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.

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.

I think singing traditional country is wonderful, because I'm bringing it to my generation and to the younger kids.

There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.

There is no singing anymore, everything is yelling and shouting and rapping and that is real boring to a guy like me.

I'm less of a straight-up, traditional vocalist.

I miss the days when girls would wear full long dresses and just stand onstage and sing. That's what I'm trying to bring back: that timeless element. I want to create music that people will be listening to in fifty years, you know?

Looking back at those great singers like Gordon MacRae and Howard Keel - they have such a specific kind of style that it seems like we don't really appreciate anymore.

We have a tradition of passing our history orally and singing a lot of it and writing songs about it and there's kind of a calling in Irish voices when they're singing in their Irish accent.

My vocal style is called bel canto, which is an old Italian vocal style going back hundreds of years.

Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped.

For some reason I've been labeled that and it's fine, but there are a lot of other artists that sing real traditional stuff, so I don't know why they picked me. That's what I've always done.