Merle Haggard Quotes

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.

To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.

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

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Actually, I'm the Scottish Woody Guthrie.

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.

Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That's what classical music is, real European music.

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.

I guess I'm the last of the Cockneys.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

I've always liked country music. It's a certain aspect of America that goes back to the British Isles and the influence is very native to America.

I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.

I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.

The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

I wouldn't have been able to move to L.A. if I felt I was going to lose my identity as a New Jerseyian. My accent has gotten thicker since I've lived here.

The Kurds were in the Middle East long before the Arabs.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.

Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.

Folk songs express the dreams and prayers and hopes of the working people.

My dad's family comes from the North, and my mother's family comes from somewhere around Carmarthenshire.