If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.
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.
Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!
It's a folk singer's job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people
I play these [folk acoustic] concerts and I ask myself, 'Would you come see me tonight?' - and I'd have to answer truthfully, 'No, I wouldn't come. I'd rather be doin' something else, really I would. That something else is rock. . . The words are pictures, and the rock's gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures. (1965)
Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.
I don't really know what 'folk music' means anymore.
I used to be a folk singer, but I was. . . dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog. And being a folk singer doesn't make you attractive to women.
Where weary folk toil, black with smoke, And hear but whistles scream, I went, all fresh from dawn and dew To carry them a dream. I went to bitter lanes and dark, Who once had known the sky, To carry them a dream-and found They had more dreams than I.
I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk.
Threatened folk live long.
Difficult folk, these women!
One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such. " And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them. "
And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.
You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.
We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.
I really don't like being referred to as a folk artist.
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.
I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since.