Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The four things a hillbilly singer needs are a Cadillac, a Nudie suit, the right hairdo, and a pair of pointy-toed boots.
When times are good, we have tunes to dance to; when times are tough, we're supposed to talk about it. That's country music.
I started out in gospel music. A lot of people don't know that I started out in gospel music, and I've never lost sight of it.
Well, I was dedicated to God before I was born by Momma and Daddy, and I was raised in a very traditional Southern Baptist home.
When I was 5 years old, I got my first record. It was 'Flatt & Scruggs' Greatest Hits.' The second was 'The Fabulous Johnny Cash.'
Country music as a genre, as an art form, is just as valid out there in the pantheon of the arts as classical, jazz, ballet, whatever.
Where better than the church for people like me, George Jones and Johnny Cash to go to get ourselves in shape enough to sing a gospel song?
After something has run its course, you either become a parody and keep doing it, or tear it down and know the truth about it, warts and all.
I learned things by being in Lester Flatts' band, and I learned things by playing with Johnny Cash, and I learned from Pop Staples. I'm a sponge.
There's the chart -- and there's the heart. And it's great when they both line up. But you better follow your heart, 'cause that's where it's at.
Well, my heart finally found a home when I married Connie Smith, and I was tired of feeling bad. And it was time to grow up and get on with life.
American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.
If I go into the Mississippi Delta at pitch black midnight and put on a Robert Johnson record, it's hard to sit in the car because it's pretty powerful.
He is irreplaceable. Even in death I have no doubt that Johnny Cash will continue to live on as an inspiration to musicians and songwriters and all of America.
Merle Haggard once said, 'I'm really mad at Glen Campbell because he's the most talented human being in the world.' That kind of summed it up. Merle didn't miss!
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.
Well, I've always said that country music has always shared a very unique relationship with gospel music - the hooting and hollering, you know, always in abundance.
I love old-time music, I love country music and I love the American music that we have to offer the world. And any part of that is fine with me, as long as it's pure.
As big as the industry is now and as gargantuan and stretched out with as many buses and trucks as there are now, it is still a big old dysfunctional family in my mind.
Nobody in my school knew who Bill Monroe was, or Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and barely Johnny Cash. Nobody spoke that language. I proceeded to get myself kicked out.
There's every other guitar player and then there's Chet. He transcended musical boundaries for more than fifty years. God only lays Chet Atkins on you once in a lifetime.
We need a new Hank Williams, a new Jimmy Webb. We need new writers, a new Tom Petty. We need people that write what they feel and what they see - things that are relevant.
There's something cool about playing 'Tempted' and then picking up the mandolin and playing 'Dark as a Dungeon' and standing on the classics. It's nice to just let soul rule.
As a photographer, God's light in Southern California is something unlike I've ever seen on planet Earth. There's a beauty about it, especially in the afternoon that is so pretty.
It's the hillbilly rock, beat it with a drum. Playin' them guitars like shootin from a gun. Keepin' up the rhythm, steady as a clock. Doin' a little thing called the hillbilly rock.
I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.
I swear, there is Capitol Studios and then there's every other studio on the planet Earth. It is the ultimate, paramount of sound in the United States of America. It is a magical place.
I saw footage of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley just hanging out together in Memphis when they were young guys getting started at Sun, listening to records together. That was beautiful to me.
Addiction is a crazy disease. It's a progressive disease when it's not dealt with; it don't care who it takes, and it takes it all. You wind up losing your house, your home, your reputation.
Well, being from Mississippi, the church house is kind of the common denominator. It was for me growing up. Like so many public performers, that was the first place I was ever invited to sing.
I wish I could have been in the control room at Capitol Studio A listening to the playback of 'Wichita Lineman' the first time it came into the atmosphere. It must have been a perfect moment in time.
Hillbilly Rock' was the song that opened the door and gave me a reason to get a bus and a band and cowboy clothes to go out there and figure it out in front of everybody. And the hits started coming.
If you look at just right, there's not a nickel's worth of difference between what Buck Owens and the Buckaroos played on 'Buckaroo' and what the Ventures were playing. It's all that twangy instrumental stuff.
After people work hard and cope with the pressures of life throughout the week, going out to a show or tuning in to watch some characters in cowboy clothes, singing and playing songs about real life is something I relate to.
Crazy Arms' is one of those songs that can get crushed beneath its own weight. It's kind of like 'Orange Blossom Special' or 'Rocky Top' or 'Crazy.' But when you go back to the original interpretation, you hear it in a new way.
My local radio station, WHOC, Philadelphia, Mississippi - '1490 on your radio dial, a thousand watts of pure pleasure' - it was a beautiful station. And I loved everything I heard. But it was country music that touched my heart.
There wasn't really a lot of difference from a Mississippi perspective between what Elvis did on 'Mystery Train' or 'Milkcow Blues' or what Bill Monroe was playing or what Flatt and Scruggs was playing; it was rock 'n' roll to me.
Going back to the Byrds and 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo,' when country was kind of getting away from the fiddle and steel aspect, it took some rock & rollers to introduce a new generation to it, and it kinda put some things straight.
Growing up in the Sixties, whether it was the Batmobile or the costumes Porter Wagoner wore or the music that came from there, California was the home of what a friend of mine calls 'custom culture.' It seemed like the promised land.
I got to Nashville on Labor Day weekend in 1972. And the Grand Ole Opry is still there, the Country Music Hall of Fame is still there. And the roots of country music are still there. It's where the authenticity and the empowering force lies.
One thing that I love about country music, probably more so than any other culture - maybe the blues rivals it - there are so many American folk heroes. There's the Coal Miner's Daughter, the Man in Black, the Red-Headed Stranger, and on and on.
Nothing will prepare you for singing the truth like about 35 years in the music business, financial troubles and a couple trips to jail, ... It will get you really humble and really truthful, and gets you ready to sing out about who and what saved you.
Country music has taken so many forms, and I've always contended that it does not matter if the casual listener falls in love with country music through Florida Georgia Line, Taylor Swift, Old Crow Medicine Show or whomever - just get in and start digging!
Well, the things that country music is parodied for sometimes - trains, drinking, sin, cheating, redemption, jailhouses, rambling, hoboing, on and on, all those things - according to The New York Times, every one of those subject matters is still relevant.
I loved the Rolling Stones. I heard a little bit of country music creeping around the edges of some of their songs. Being a Mississippi kid, I could feel they had done their homework, even when I was a little boy. I could feel the Delta blues influence in a lot of their work.
I went out on the road when I was 12 years old, playing with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers. That was the summer of 1972. We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, George Wallace campaign rallies and bluegrass festivals. As a kid, I had grown up watching quartets that were very entertaining.
Growing up in Mississippi, the first song that I ever remember hearing, that captivated my mind and transported me from my bedroom out to the West, is a song called 'Don't Take Your Guns to Town' by Johnny Cash. That's when I was 5-years-old. And I played that song over and over again. I pantomimed it in school for show-and-tell.
I used to watch those syndicated, black-and-white Country Music Television shows from the '60s with my dad. And all of those people that played on our television set, they just felt like family to me. And I believed in my heart, as a little kid, that I would be doing that someday and I would know all those people and we would be friends.
From watching Lester (Flatt), I learned that it's important to be loyal to the people who made you and bought your music. He called me up to the front of the (tour) bus on the very first trip I went on with him. Lester pointed out two elderly people who were walking towards the but. He said, 'Those two people have been coming to see me since the mid 40's. That's what a country fan is all about.'
I call this my church house trilogy. Souls' Chapel really was music from the Mississippi Delta, which to me is a church within itself. The Delta is the church of American Roots music. The Badlands is a cathedral without a top on it. And the Ryman has been called the Mother Church of Country Music, but to me it's the Mother Church of American Music. If you can think it up, it's been done there. In my mind, this is kind of a spiritual odyssey as much as anything else, and I had the settings of three churches to make it in.