My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.
So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.
It is great to know that the lives and careers of country music's artists are being documented through the Hall of Fame's expert archival and curatorial resources.
And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.
Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.
You know, we have a long history of covering different periods of this band's development with a live record... a sort of live thing that would be done for three or four records, and that was the intention with this particular package.
There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes.
Live performances make music important. Recording is cool and fun, and it's nice to document the thing you made, but the goal in my mind is to perform.
I learned by transcribing songs out of the Library of Congress collection in Washington where I was working. I got a job when I just turned twenty in 1939 and Alan [Lomax] needed some help. I listened to hundreds of records every week.
There's a lot of good musicians who are unheard of. Get it down before they pass away.
