Ketch Secor
I enjoy writing songs that could have been written before [my time]. When I feel like I'm tapping into a deep vein in the body of American music, it gives me strength as a writer, like I'm dipping my pen into a deep ink well. That's the folk music tradition. Like Pete Seeger said, 'Everyone's a link in the chain.' It's a strong chain, so rely on it. ... I believe it takes all those great songs in the past to make your song even a little bit good.Collection: Song
I think it is good for people who are incarcerated or who are bound up one way or the other-people like Lily Kimball and all the prostitues of Memphis. This gal, she needs some wings, and a good song can make that happen.Collection: Song
It’s bound to be one hell of a steel wheelin, railroadin good time…while the western country rolls by and the smoke rises blacker than musical notes pouring out of that stoked-up-and-chuggin iron chariot.Collection: Country
It seems like everyone's listening to fiddles and banjos.Collection: Listening
Because music gets you high, so it makes sense to sing about what else gets you high.Collection: Make Sense
I guess it's a bit like not claiming your brother at school. This kind of disowning of the thing that you're most like. You want to be something cool, like Michael Jackson say, with a boom box over your shoulder and wearing leather. But you know deep down you're just a hayseed.Collection: Brother
It's not very long ago that we were all singing country music. And country music is equally black as it is white and that's important to recognize.Collection: Country
It's true that bluegrass is a virtuosic form and asks that of its performer. Old-time music is older rawer and purer. It's less stylized. We don't solo. Well sometimes we do, but it's different it has more to do with rock-and-roll than bluegrass does.Collection: Rocks
This indie rock stuff, I mean I like it, too - it pushes all my buttons: sex appeal, dissonance. It's emotive, disenchanted.Collection: Sex
Sometimes our significant others travel with us.Collection: Sometimes
I think country music is a champion of women. That stuff coming out of Nashville now wants to see a woman looking good in the kitchen whipping up some biscuits.Collection: Country
We never had a girl in the band. Why? Certainly there's some rippin' female players in our kind of music. We have no objection to it. It'd be wonderful.Collection: Girl
Like anybody else of my era, I listened to a whole lot of Michael Jackson. I guess I was probably inspired by the way he danced, and the way he sang, and his image.Collection: Way
Y'all drinking whiskey is probably a gregarious act. When you're not an alcoholic it's pretty fun to drink whiskey. But when you are it's a very solo ritual. It's not gregarious at all. But vice has always informed country music and all music.Collection: Country
We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.Collection: Teenager
Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.Collection: Country
I heard Pete Seeger records when I was a kid. I saw Bob Dylan when I was about 12. The first song I ever learned to play was a song by Phil Ochs.Collection: Song
I didn't grow up on the porch of a cabin looking out over the 90 acres that the mule was plowing with Paw-Paw playing the banjo. But I was always interested in folk music.Collection: Growing Up
Country music has been empowering to women. Women invented it - it was women singing to their children that built country music. The people making country music today might not even know that it all started with a midwife. But it's true, it really did. That's where Michael learned to shake it the way he did. It wasn't from old Papa Jackson, I'll tell you that.Collection: Country