My dad, the old professor, used to say, ‘Never get into an argument about what’s folk music and what isn’t.’
You’d be surprised how many stupid mistakes I’ve made. I make stupid mistakes all the time, and some of them have been very big stupid mistakes.
The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for slavery.
I live in the country, so I get a fair amount of exercise. We heat our house with wood, so I split wood. We also live on a steep hill, and I have to rake and put in cross-stitches to keep the road from washing out when there’s a big rain.
I try to sing many different kinds of songs. If I sing a batch of humorous songs, I’ll throw in a deadly serious song. Or if I’m singing too many serious songs, I’ll throw in a ridiculous song, to mix it up.
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.