Folk Song Quotes

Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing ... I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now. ~ Bruce Hornsby

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? ~ Milan Kundera

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." ~ Pete Seeger

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile. ~ Alan Lomax

I used to go to the school folk club with my songs when I was only 13 or so and say "this is a traditional folk song" and sing it with a bad Irish accent to disguise the real source. ~ Mark Knopfler

Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: 'The mother of folklore is poverty.'3 ~ Rob Young

Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it). ~ George Gershwin

A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it or it could be
who's hungry and where their mouth is or
who's out of work and where the job is or
who's broke and where the money is or
who's carrying a gun and where the peace is. ~ Woody Guthrie

An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words. ~ Boris Pasternak

subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey a horse gone wonky.' Throughout most of the ~ Elaine Morgan

Hah!" said Granny Weatherwax. "I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about ... cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about ... something else entirely," she added darkly. ~ Terry Pratchett

Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening. ~ Bob Dylan

I leaned my back against an oak Thinking it was a trusty tree. But first it bent, And then it broke And let me down as my love did me. - "The Water Is Wide," traditional folk song ~ Jill Barnett

Well, at first the band were simply called Horsepower, but a lot of people thought that was something to do with heroin. That really pissed me off, so I decided to put something in front of it to distract them. I got '16' from a traditional American folk song, where a man is singing about his dead wife and 16 black horses are pulling her casket up to the cemetery. I liked the image of 16 working horses. ~ David Eugene Edwards

Some times I live in the country
Some times I live in town
Some times I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown

Irene good night Irene good night
Good night Irene Good night Irene
I'll see you in my dreams ~ American Traditional Folk Song

I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song. ~ Frank Black

If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song ~ Oscar Isaac

My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible. ~ Emilia Clarke

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. ~ Pete Seeger

One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Loading your brain with subliminal messages ... How loathsome to turn a sadistic murder into entertainment [in the newspaper]
and yet how hard not to read about it. What dark comedy to realize that you are scanning for descriptions of torture as you disapprove. Which of course only makes it more entertaining. "But naturally I was hoping they'd report something grisly," you say to your friends, who chuckle lighthearted acknowledgment of hypocrisy. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I always knew Gordon Lightfoot was a really great songwriter, but his stuff even sounds better and better all the time. It's just so really good to me. It's just like that's what should be in a dictionary, you know, next to a really good contempory folk song, is a Gordon Lightfoot song. ~ John Prine

Peace is not just a colored ribbon. It's more than a wristband or a t-shirt. It's not just a donation or a 5 K race. It's not just a folk song, or a white dove. And peace is certainly more than a celebrity endorsement. Peace is a fulltime job. It's protecting civilians, overseeing elections, and disarming ex-combatants. The UN has over 100,000 Peacekeepers on the ground, in places others can't or won't go, doing things others can't or won't do. Peace, like war, must be waged. ~ George Clooney

We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares. ~ Tom Lehrer

Once upon a winter I met a man in the woods The man beckoned me over To see a satchel of goods He offered three wishes I asked for beauty, love, riches And he froze me in stone where I stood. - "The Greedy Ghost of Cypress Pass," common folk song ~ Marie Lu

as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey ~ Elaine Morgan

She was humming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out - a folk song? a lullabye? - and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs. ~ Gillian Flynn

holy scripture was believed to justify her subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey a ~ Elaine Morgan

Love is the only song I sing. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

People talk about Frank [Sinatra] all the time - and they should talk about Frank - but he had the greatest arrangers. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards. ~ Bob Dylan

But the case has proved that to be true which Appius says in his songs, that each man is the maker of his own fate. ~ Sallust

Ubiquitous, adj.
When it's going well, the fact of it is everywhere. It's there in the song that shuffles into your ears. It's there in the book you're reading. It's there on the shelves of the store as you reach for a towel and forget about the towel. It's there as you open the door. As you stare off into the subway, it's what you're looking at. You wear it on the inside of your hat. It lines your pockets. It's the temperature.
The hitch, of course, it that when it's going badly, it's in all the same places. ~ David Levithan

Gerald's arm rose and fell the same way to any song he led, no matter the time signature. He had a nasal twang when he spoke and sang, like a younger Grandpa Jones, but his pitch wasn't bad and he seemed to enjoy song-leading. His job was to get everybody started at the same place and everybody stopped when the song was over, but whatever happened in the middle was up to God and the congregation. ~ Chris Fabry

Laughter is poison to fear. (Catelyn Stark) ~ George R R Martin

I don't really write journals and stuff and then adapt them to music, it's completely within the form of the song. My great obsession and basically the bane of my existence is caring probably too much about every word, but it's too late to change my career path. ~ Emily Haines

If you can make a little painting for the ears with a few words, well, I like words: I like cutting them up and finding different ways of saying the same thing. I get into a spell, and it all comes easy. I don't labor over it. I go inside the song. I think you make yourself an antenna for songs, and songs want to be around you. And then they bring other songs along, and then they're all sittin' around, and they're drinking your beer, and they're sleeping on the floor. And they are using the phone. They're rude, thankless little f-ers. ~ Tom Waits

I'm writing songs that connect to millions of people. And that happens for a reason. I don't really worry too much about people who aren't into it because that's the beauty of music. It's subjective. If every single person in the world loved our music, then that'd be weird. ~ Matthew Healy

I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time. ~ Zach Condon

I'm pretty sure in my older years, I'll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music. ~ Dolly Parton

My songs don't play on pop radio; they play on black radio. ~ Robin Thicke

Sometimes when I'm writing a song I'll get carried away with production when I'm only on the first verse, and that sacrifices the songwriting. ~ Nina Nesbitt

Rather often I am asked whether the grief remains as intense as when I wrote. The answer is, No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared. That is as it should be. If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over.

Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it… Every lament is a love-song. ~ Nicholas Wolterstorff

Writing a song is almost like cheating-writing because you don't have to finish your sentences, you don't have to use any punctuation, no one's going to edit your work. It's so wide open. People just grunt and that's a song. You can kind of do anything. ~ Mirah

Literature is, to my mind, the great teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values, and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that blows where it listeth; it must claim its right to pierce through every crevice of human nature, and to descrive the relation of the soul and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that relation as it is, not as we would have it be ... ~ W.B.Yeats

I ask but one thing of you, only one, That always you will be my dream of you; That never shall I wake to find untrue All this I have believed and rested on, Forever vanished, like a vision gone Out into the night. Alas, how few There are who strike in us a chord we knew Existed, but so seldom heard its tone We tremble at the half-forgotten sound. The world is full of rude awakenings And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground, Yet still our human longing vainly clings To a belief in beauty through all wrongs. O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs! ~ Amy Lowell

It's not just a revue where one song is done, then another. There are concepts and ideas at work. ~ Hal David

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it? ~ Marshall McLuhan

Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself to it knowingly, it was as cold as it was hot, as rational as it was lethal. To embrace the Rage was to embrace a splendor, a glory, a denial of all restraint but not of reason. It was pure, elemental purpose, unencumbered by compassion or horror or pity, yet it was far more than mere frenzy. ~ David Weber

I'm not done writing songs about you yet. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Love is a word we scarcely hear in the ocean. It exists only in my song and on the lips of the princes I've killed. And I have never heard it from my mother's mouth. ~ Alexandra Christo

I think everything should have an end, an end of the brutal stuff happening home. ENd for the song, end of the film, end of the evil... This how it must go and it will go, if you think that evil has gone it's still here. If you believe in god, that's means that you believe this evil. ~ Deyth Banger

I heard the silence pouring from them. The audience held themselves quiet, tense, and tight, as if the song had burned them worse than flame.
Each person held their wounded selves closely, clutching their pain as if it were a precious thing. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

They knew her, the graveyard folk, for each of us encounters the Lady on the Grey at the end of our days, and there is no forgetting her. ~ Neil Gaiman

And since discriminating fans can pick and choose exactly what they want to buy, artists and their labels are more conscious than they've ever been of making sure that every song on a new album is as good as can be. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Every video you see in the movie we have an entire video of it that will be on the DVD, so the whole video for African Child, the whole video for Super Tight, you know the Jackie Q songs. ~ Nicholas Stoller

I'm fighting for this girl on the battlefield of love
Got me look like baby Cupid
Sending arrows from above ~ Jay Sean

And I'm the biggest country fan there is, but I'm always a little cautious of a slower song or just a song with subject matter. ~ Dierks Bentley

Nothin'. Nothin' at all. But there are a lot of folk out there who can't just be themselves right away. Some people have a lot of scars they carry around and it takes a while for them to be willing to make themselves vulnerable again. You," she paused, giving weight to her next words, "don't give those people a chance. ~ D.H. Starr

They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Sing your song; don't let the bastards get you down. ~ Garrison Keillor

Elli couldn't help it, she had to. She smiled before saying, "Nothing much, but Shea?"
"Yeah?" he asked wearily as she smirked up at him.
"I'll never break your heart. I'll never make you cry," she continued to sing the chorus of the well known Backstreet Boys song as Shea turned beet red with embarrassment.
"Grace, I swear I'm going to kill you!" Shea yelled. ~ Toni Aleo

I always like Madonna; any Madonna song is good for me. ~ Jenna Dewan

When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it. ~ Florence Welch

I always feel like I have got so much to write about, when it comes to writing for the album. I still think that even though my songs are written from my perspective, I think that all age-ranges can relate to the songs. ~ Pixie Lott