What I like about pop music, and why I’m still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music.
I’m not a go-out-with-a-band artist. I’m an intimate, storytelling folk artist. It guides the writing and makes for a concert that I’m proud of.
The way I feel is that if you don’t like folk music, stay away from my shows.
I have sung as many as 6,000 songs of various hues, be they classical, pop or folk songs. I have even performed free of charge for the Maharashtra government.
You’ve got to go down the road you naturally go down, and for me it was pop, folk country, just feel-good music. I suppose most of my songs are very up-tempo.
I like a lot of soul, but I also put a lot of folk into what I do.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn’t go wrong. I don’t know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn’t done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.
I was looking for some vintage furniture, and I came across this booth where they sold old pictures. This guy didn’t just have things in a box; he had really curated his collection. Each image was like this little folk masterpiece.
One thing that I love about country music, probably more so than any other culture – maybe the blues rivals it – there are so many American folk heroes. There’s the Coal Miner’s Daughter, the Man in Black, the Red-Headed Stranger, and on and on.
Clarinet is often associated with certain genres, like swing or folk music. I combine the old and new, using the clarinet as an expressive tool and not in one genre. I’m just happy that people are drawn to what I do.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
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.
Listening to all these different musical genres from all over the world and listening to my father’s record collection, the Irish folk influences from home. Of course they’re all in there somewhere hiding within the lyrics and melodies. But rap music was the biggest influence on my way of writing and my performing.
I love the U.K. folk scene. In the States, nobody knows what to do with me. There’s still a very narrow definition of Americana.
As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren’t considered to be ‘black’ choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that ‘black folk don’t swim’; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.
When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you’ve got to have your story together. You’ve got to study and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation, and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He’s got an understanding that you don’t hear that often.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
I’ve got an Avalon guitar – that’s the company that used to be Lowden. They come out of Ireland, and they’re like these folk kind of guitars. You can pick ’em, you can strum ’em – they’re quite good.
One of my problems is I’m not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I’ve always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.
I want to go to Denmark and Scandinavia. We’ve been inundated with their telly recently, and I’ve never been to any of those countries. I really want to get to know the people. I quite fancy living there for a bit if I could take a month off. They just seem like upfront, friendly folk.
I’m a touring musician. I don’t watch the charts. I had the kind of success I’d hoped for. I won Grammys for a folk record, and that was magic.
As I was born and brought up in Himachal Pradesh, I used to listen to a lot of Hindi songs over radio apart from ghazals, western music, and ‘Himachali’ folk songs.
Most things in my life I had before leaving home. Values, support, great family. I was shaped at an early age. A musician playing guitar, I wanted to be a 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. I felt a calling.
We’ve always had to bring some form of ID to vote. It’s just that states have created new forms of ID that young folk and seniors and students and people of color, it makes it challenging to get.
When I was small – I grew up in a village outside of Krakow – my brothers and sisters and I would play folk instruments and make music in our home.
Lana Del Rey seems to be bothering everybody because she allegedly ‘remade’ herself from a folk singing, girl-next-door type into an electro-urban kitty cat on the prowl (of course I like her), and they feel she is inauthentic.
Folk music usually romanticises the road. ‘Back in my Body’ tells the opposite story.
My favorite Bob Dylan record is the very first one where he sings one Bob Dylan song and the rest of them are his interpretations of the Dust Bowl-era folk songs, or even going back as far as the mass influx of people coming into the U.S. during the gold rush. His interpretations of those songs are incredible.
Growing up, we had folk records.
After college, rather than pursue real work, I joined a folk group and sang in coffee houses and nightclubs, an occupation that does little for the intellect and even less for the complexion.
Anything that anybody wants to give me is great! I’ve had folk songs, heavy metal songs, jewellery… I would never call anything any fan gives me weird, as it’s how people express what they like about the books, what it means to them, and that’s a wonderful thing.
Normally I would not recommend a book that tells you how to make money in the stock market. Most of these books are aimed at gullible folk, and they usually make much more money for their authors than they do for the investing public.
Lonnie Donegan and the folk movement were responsible for a lot of the spread of the blues in England. The group Them with Van Morrison was a big influence on me, too, as were The Stones; The Yardbirds, John Mayall, and the other British blues pioneers.
My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the ’90s, so music was very different then – it was really lyrical.
As artists, we must not go down to the level of the masa; we should bring them up, intellectualize our languages, create classics out of our folk arts. We can do this if we are true to our roots and strive for excellence.
I was a folk singer who became totally over the edge with country music. I found my voice and style working with Gram Parsons. I learned how to listen to George Jones records and the Louvin Brothers.
What do folk always say about Arsenal? They can pass you to death.
With ‘Mirzya,’ we went deep into folk music. The film, unfortunately, did not do well because it was not marketed well. But we got freedom to do the music the way we want.
I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
If I could, I’d sing old French songs or American folk music, but I sure as hell can’t do it as well as Mississippi John Hurt – no way in hell am I getting near that!
I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music.
Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.
Folk music is very honest, it’s very humble, it’s very organic, and the voice is exactly that. And so I’m very excited to put the two together.
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.
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.
Real popular culture is folk art – coalminers’ songs and so forth.
What makes one type of music classical and one bluegrass and one folk – these things aren’t what’s important.
I started to develop my comedy skills when I became resident singer at the Boggery Folk Club in Solihull. My career blossomed from there, and I became a big draw on the folk-club circuit.
Banjos are used in Celtic, English folk music and obviously American music. But not that much in pop music. But it’s more versatile than people realise it to be. It’s a beautiful instrument, very rhythmic and melodic. You can do anything with it.
