If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

reality has too many heads

Together they’d run away. Together they could find a place to call home. Together they’d finally form their own constellation and never break apart again. He would be her starlight again and she his sun.

Guess life is really a road marked by crossroads. It's not the long and winding stretches that will hurt you the most. It's the crossroads. You make a bad choice and it's a tumble and a rumble before you get back on your feet again. But you'll get back on your feet. You'll find yourself. And then you'll be off to your next adventure (crossroads, I mean). In my case, I always had a safety net—my faith in God. But then, I'm more like the millions of simple folk who travel this world.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial.Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic."Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.

Why, you'll be 'changed, m'dear. We'll just swap you for a human child who'll make a good servant to the Band. Half Humans never work out 'mongst the Folk. No, never do.""But--I'm half Folk too... What if I never work out 'mongst the humans?""Aye, you're neither one thing nor yet quite t'other. Pity, but there 'tis.

Folk can’t learn their lessons if they skip school.

And of a Sunday swarm the folkUnder the honeysuckle vine, Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke, The sun, the melody, the wine.