Folk Quotes

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

I think they do a great job on Queer as Folk.

There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.

If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.

My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.

Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'

It's taken folk a while to come around, hasn't it? Even the boys in the band weren't too sure about the whole art thing. They just wanted me to concentrate on the music. But they respect it now.

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.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

Folk is bare bones music.

I even played bass for a while. Besides playing electric guitar, I'd also get asked to play some acoustic stuff. But, since I didn't have an acoustic guitar at the time, I used to borrow one from a friend so I could play folk joints.

I came late to the genre of folk music.

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.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

Well, I don't think it ever did, but in the early '60s I got interested in folk music.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

All their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato; alas good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

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.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

There's nothing quite like tobacco: it's the passion of decent folk, and whoever lives without tobacco doesn't deserve to live.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.