Christmas brings us great music: Everything from Handel's 'Messiah' to 'White Christmas,' to 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.'
Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in both soul and R&B traditions had crossed over.
I'm interested in Qawwali and the blues.
I was always looking for evidence of these common musical roots, but I was too young to know that what I was doing was called ethnomusicology.
We'll be presenting a broad spectrum of the music and looking at how the younger guys can carry it on.
People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we've created in America - cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.
Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.
I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.
From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.
If New Orleans is allowed to die, a crucial part of the world's music heritage will disappear.
Country music is worldwide - it's not just Nashville and Texas.
There were some older guitarists on my side of town, and I got to know many of them.
I think what the public knows as 'Southern rock' will never be repeated.
I was really intrigued by how - sort of the common themes and sort of the blend among music, and that was sort of my real interest was, at one point, musically, was how you could weave those different kinds of songs and traditions together.
What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.
The story of American pop music is the story of failure. The blues, country music, it's not the story of success. People don't win; they lose.
American music has infiltrated the entire world enough as it is. Mexican music must be defended with vigilance.
People my age don't always know where their music comes from.
It's interesting to marry American musical traditions with the subtlety of English-style storytelling and folk singer-songwriters like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch - they're two heritages that are distinct but also cross over on so many levels.
I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.
I am an old soul: I do know so much about music history.
It seems like bluegrass people have more great stories to tell than other musicians.
Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world. You meet people at festivals and renew acquaintances year after year.
I was rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know.
