Brownie McGhee Quotes

Americana Music is about all sorts of different music. It's very free and open: a world where people just like authentic music.

Country music is the people's music. It just speaks about real life and about truth and it tells things how they really are.

The native music of North America, the original-roots music of this country, is also the underworld music of this country.

When I listen to most forms of music, in their most raw and pure, it all has a punk edge to me, like Lead Belly, Jimmie Rodgers, Otis Redding or Nirvana.

I don't really know what 'folk music' means anymore.

I used to be fast and loose with the term 'country' because I didn't know what else to call my music. I still don't.

When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.

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.

Country music has always been about as close to R&B as you can possibly get. We're storytellers.

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

First I was a European-style player, then I was a downtown 'noise guy,' and now some people call me an Americana guy.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

I don't know anybody who doesn't hate being called alt.country. It just sounds like a website. I don't mind being called Americana, I don't mind being called country noir, or independent country is fine, but the words alt.country make me insane.

Folk music is where I come from originally. The very first thing that introduced me to playing guitars at all was skiffle - my cousin had been in London the summer that skiffle was big.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It's when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

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.

I've always considered myself a folk singer, even though we strapped on Rickenbacker guitars and played pretty loud.

This is the bunch of songs I did first, and it's just the type of thing I do. I am a Carter Family girl, so the record is book-ended with Carter Family songs.

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.

I always thought I was singing American folk music.

I never saw myself as a folk singer.

I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.

I was mainly influenced by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and others like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash.

I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.