I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you’re starting to kill yourself artistically.
I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.
I believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.
I don’t think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity.
Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I’d sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.
Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.
I guess I’ve learned more from the Clearwater than anything else. All I did was help to plant a seed, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Like most teachers, I’m just another sower of seeds.
I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball’s chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.
Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the “Folk Song Revival.” My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about “the vernacular.”
I never intended to make a living from music. That’s the funny thing. I wanted to be a journalist.
I was never enthusiastic about being somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of something.
It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely extraordinarily thoughtful person Dr. King was.
The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.
It’s been my belief that learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing.
Keep your sense of humor. There is a 50-50 chance the world can be saved. You- yes you- might be the grain of sand that tips the scales the right way.
Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are uprooted people, and have few deep roots.
The world is like a seesaw out of balance: on one side is a box of big rocks, tilting it its way. On the other side is a box, and a bunch of us with teaspoons, adding a little sand at a time. One day, all of our teaspoons will add up, and the whole thing will tip, and people will say, ‘How did it happen so fast?
It all boils down to what I would most like to do as a musician. Put songs on people’s lips instead of just in their ears.