Some shed real light on folk music itself. Some are funny; some profound.
"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song". (Louis Armstrong and Big Bill Broonzy)
"At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement going on, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement". (Bernice Johnson Reagon)
"But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with The Beatles’ beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there". (Roger McGuinn)
"Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them". (Brownie McGhee)
"Folk is bare bones music". (Ben Harper)
"Folk music was out there. Clubs were springing up and they were hot with the college kids”. (Dick Smothers)
"Folk rock was my real roots. I did a few gigs as a folk artist, in the style of Fairport Convention". (Alan Parsons)
"I always thought I was singing American folk music". (Lonnie Donegan)
"I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child". (Stephen Stills)
"I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music". (Alan Lomax)
"I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition". (Bruce Springsteen)
"I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references". (Joanna Newsom)
"I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer". (Robert Wyatt)
"It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs". (Barry McGuire)
"Jazz is the folk music of the machine age". (Paul Whiteman)
"Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people". (Brownie McGhee)
"My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues". (Mark Knopfler)
"People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education". (David Soul)
"Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors". (Donal Henahan)
"Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat". (Van Morrison)
"The big turning point, really, was The Beatles' influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came The Lovin' Spoonful and everybody else". (Barry McGuire)
"You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture". (Sonny Terry)
"There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them". (Eugene Chadbourne)
Listen (and watch): Louis ‘All Music is Folk Music’ Armstrong - What A Wonderful World
