Top 44 American Music Quotes

Words matter. These are the best American Music Quotes from famous people such as Anat Cohen, Eric Burdon, Jain, David Bryan, George Ezra, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Influences at home, including classical music, were not

Influences at home, including classical music, were not all specifically jazz, but the family radio was always on… So there was always some connection to American culture, to American music.
Anat Cohen
You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.
Eric Burdon
Well, the thing is I always listened to American music way more than French music.
Jain
The American Music Awards mean more to us; that’s a people’s award, and we’re a people’s band. The Grammys are the critics.
David Bryan
The music that I first fell in love with was American music, really. Nothing against British acts – I love them and will forever – but on the whole, it was the art of American storytelling in the kind of folk and blues lyrics that, if you scratch a little bit, there’s a heartbreaking story there.
George Ezra
I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It’s there to be a museum showcase of all that’s great about American music.
Ian Anderson
Performing the American Music Awards and having Harrison Ford introduce you behind the John Williams orchestra for Star Wars, and then Meghan Trainor is in the front just standing up and like, ‘I love you guys!’ That was a huge moment.
Kevin Olusola
We don’t compete with the Grammys. The Grammys compete with us. They have taken the stance that anybody who performs on ‘The American Music Awards’ cannot appear on ‘The Grammys.’ I don’t agree with that philosophy.
Dick Clark
American music is a powerful ingredient in international music, and as much as it comes from within, it also comes from without.
Taj Mahal
I learned that instead of relying on and imitating American music, there is a better chance for an Asian artist to succeed if he or she follows his or her own culture.
Rain
There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.
John Deacon
It’s like there’s the rest of the world, and then there’s America. Part of the reason I would really love continue to making music over here because so much of American music has inspired me, whether it’s Jeff Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.
Tom Odell
Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.
Cassandra Wilson
American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.
Rhiannon Giddens
At our peril, we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs… For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.
Kevin Young
Patty Griffin is iconic, and there’s no other word to really describe her. She is iconic for a lot of people – not only for me but for a lot of fans. Her voice is one of a kind, and she’s such an important figure in the American music scene.
Dierks Bentley
I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
Ben Harper
It’s amazing how English music manages to travel to America and obviously, American music in the U.K. is massive.
Ben Howard
Since I was a kid, I’ve had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties – but I’d never really touched on dark Americana.
Robert Plant
All roads lead to ‘American Pie.’ ‘As American as apple pie’ was the saying. It was some kind of a big American song that I wanted to write, which would be a conclusion for my show and bring all the songs home, which it still does. I can go anywhere I want with American music and come home to that. And it all makes sense.
Don McLean
The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don’t listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don’t listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.
Branford Marsalis
Sun Studios was where so much of American music exploded from.
Marty Stuart
I joke to people in the press that I realize I’m not black, I’m actually white. But I’ve got these roots in black American music. I love it.
Glenn Hughes
I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.
Hozier
American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized.
Kamasi Washington
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
Ken Burns
We can watch videos of our whole journey – from old tours to doing the AMAs (American Music Awards) in 2013 and through the ‘Star Wars’ medley or when we sang with Stevie Wonder on the Grammys. I just sit back and say, ‘I can’t believe we did all this!’
Kevin Olusola
There is a definite Chinese pop sound developing, but I was shocked at how influenced it is by American music.
Paul Oakenfold
I’m more American than anything else. I grew up in China, but I was fulfilled at a young age by American music. It was my biggest inspiration.
Peter Max
I was into playing American music, especially the blues.
Mark Knopfler
When I read about Gram Parsons’ dream of this Cosmic American Music when I was in my late teens, that stuck with me: that idea, that ambition, to draw off the roots of music but take it somewhere fresh.
Richard Ashcroft
English urban artists were very used to making secondha

English urban artists were very used to making secondhand American music, and I thought that was boring.
Labrinth
I’m still trying to make it. I’m still trying to get this over and do it and hopefully leave some kind of a mark on the course of American music, particularly in the tradition of what you might call the singer-songwriter.
Steve Forbert
I’ve never set out consciously to write American music. I don’t know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
Carlisle Floyd
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
James Weldon Johnson
The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.
Fredric Jameson
Beale Street is a very famous street in the history of America. You know, American music in particular. From the blues to jazz, it’s a connecting city from New Orleans that goes all the way up to Buffalo through New York.
Ron Cephas Jones
I don’t think there is much American music.
Harrison Birtwistle
Everybody likes music. And rock ‘n’ roll – that was the music that brought white youth and black youth together for the first time in American music history.
Daryl Davis
I grew up with the Blind Boys’ music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
Ben Harper
I love old-time music, I love country music and I love the American music that we have to offer the world. And any part of that is fine with me, as long as it’s pure.
Marty Stuart
I quite like American music, like The Fray – I’m a massive fan of them – and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard.
Louis Tomlinson
American music has infiltrated the entire world enough as it is. Mexican music must be defended with vigilance.
Juan Gabriel
I love that there’s this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people’s lives in traditional Southern American music.
Gillian Welch