Folk Songs Quotes - Page 2

• You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.

  H. G. Wells

  Song, Trying, Records

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• One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Mother, Song, War

  Source: www.coupdemainmagazine.com

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• Blues songs, like folk songs, are a continuous stream, and catching the continuities and thefts is part of what puts meaning and complexity into it - also part of the fun of it all.

  Richard F. Thomas

  Song, Fun, Catching

  Source: projects.iq.harvard.edu

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• A brilliant 1989 album, Oh Mercy; some career retrospectives; and two albums of American folk songs, with just Bob Dylan and his guitar and harmonica. All that culminated in the Grammy-winning comeback album, Time Out of Mind (1997). Once again, just as Dylan seemed to be out of it, he was back at the top of his game.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Winning, Games

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• 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.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Next Day, Singing

  Source: wrvo.org

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• A song stylist is, like, to take an old folk song like "Delia's Gone" and do a modern white man's version of it.

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Men, White Man

  Source: wrvo.org

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• I am a firm believer in playing the type of music that compliments the song the best. If it's a folk song make it sound like one. If it's a rock song make it sound like one, if it's a rap song take it off the record.

  William Clark Green

  Song, Rap, Rocks

  Source: countrymusicrocks.net

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• My mum's family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.

  Dan Auerbach

  Song, Guitar, Play

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• The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses.

  J. Frank Dobie

  Song, Horse, Cowboy

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• There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them.

  Eugene Chadbourne

  Song, Bridges, Building

  "The Billboard book of rock arranging". Book by Mark Michaels, May 1, 1990.

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• What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

  Justin Townes Earle

  Song, Writing, Bob

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• It's like a little folk song. I think it might've been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And "Merry Christmas, Everybody" by Slade, which is a rock group - a rock-pop group who are very big over there.

  Nick Lowe

  Song, Merry Christmas, Thinking

  "Nick Lowe Brings His 'Quality Holiday Revue' To America". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 22, 2014.

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• We had various kinds of tape-recorded concerts and popular music. But by the end of the flight what we listened to most was Russian folk songs. We also had recordings of nature sounds: thunder, rain, the singing of birds. We switched them on most frequently of all, and we never grew tired of them. It was as if they returned us to Earth.

  Anatoly Berezovoy

  Song, Rain, Tired

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• I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.

  Black Francis

  Song, Boston, Age

  "Black Francis can't tell Rock Chickens from EGGS" by Scott Thill, www.wired.com. July 30, 2009.

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• Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it).

  George Gershwin

  Song, New York, Essence

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• 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

  Mike Harding

  Beautiful, Mother, Song

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• Well, at first the band were simply called Horsepower, but a lot of people thought that was something to do with heroin. That really pissed me off, so I decided to put something in front of it to distract them. “I got '16' from a traditional American folk song, where a man is singing about his dead wife and 16 black horses are pulling her casket up to the cemetery. I liked the image of 16 working horses.

  David Eugene Edwards

  Song, Horse, Men

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• Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.

  Bonnie Raitt

  Song, Rocks, Guitar

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• I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

  Ernest Gellner

  Song, Book, Writing

  "The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner". Book by John A. Hall, Ian Charles Jarvie, 1996.

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• I play a couple basic folks songs and break them down. I did that on a six string. I can't recall all the songs on it. There's some finger picking on it.

  Roger McGuinn

  Song, Couple, Play

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• 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.'

  Arlo Guthrie

  Song, Serious, Said

  Comment during the track "The Story of Reuben Clamzo" on the album "One Night", 1978.

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• Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing. ...I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now.

  Bruce Hornsby

  Song, Writing, Years

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• At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

  Bernice Johnson Reagon

  Song, Commercial Music, Rights

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• Rock ’n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It's the rhythm that gets to the kids – they're starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners.

  Alan Freed

  Music, Dance, Song

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• 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

  Education, Song, Jobs

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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