Appalachian Music Quotes

I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.

Bluegrass is really a big part of my background.

Those old Appalachian singers use a falsetto sometimes. They can change their voices to sound high or low or really scratchy. When you're singing, usually you're trying to express some kind of pain or joy. I think that voice allows me to do a lot more of that.

Since the beginning, the people of the college and I have agreed that the music of MerleFest is 'traditional plus.'

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 know there's some kind of history to mountain music-like it came from Ireland or England or Scotland and we kept up the tradition.

Ralph Stanley is like an uncle to us and now that all my uncles are gone, Ralph's singing is even more precious. This album of classic folk songs is one of his best.

There are a whole lot of Carter Family songs.

I love Don Williams records. And old Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe.

Bill Monroe is not singing about life in America. He's singing about life in Kentucky and Tennessee. And yet it's had this tremendous impact, not just in America but in the world. Why is Bill Monroe's hyper-regional music so universal? We can be so different and yet still share a tremendous amount.

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

I always thought I was singing American folk music.

I've always played music. But you know, in eastern Kentucky, everybody plays music.

I like for it to be mountain music or old-time country music or traditional bluegrass. Either one will fit me. It's traditional, basically.

The first music I remember hearing was the traditional songs of Kentucky - things like 'Roll Along Kentucky Moon.'

I've always wanted to make a bluegrass album.

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.

Coming from bluegrass background, I totally understand family harmonies.

A lot of people don't realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

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.

Well, you know, my grandmother actually grew up, you know, her whole family, my mom's family outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Uncle Dave Macon was a great balladeer and banjo player from the early part of the 19th century... He would take a social problem or something that he was looking at and make up a clever little song about it, you know, in a language everyone understood, a man of the people.

The mountain music... is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.

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.