Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.
Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.
Every time I’m in the woods, i feel like I’m in church.
Some may find them merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I.
Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.
Song, songs kept them going and going; They didn’t realize the millions of seeds they were sowing. They were singing in marches, even singing in jail. Songs gave them the courage to believe they would not fail.
Folks out in the country couldn’t afford to pay for anybody else to make music. They had to make their own. So the peasantry had their music, and it was about a hundred years ago given the name “Folk music”.
Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.
I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.
I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.
My mother gave me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the day.
When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life.
Food is one of the great organizing tools.
When I got out of school, I spent two years just hitchhiking around. Every time I met some old farmer who could play banjo, I got him to teach me a lick or two. Little by little, I put it together.
Hope that there are many, many small leaders.
I was working for Alan Lomax in the Library of Congress folk song archive, and starting to realize what a wealth of different kinds of music there was in this country that you never heard on the radio.
Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses.
Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.
I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.