I was working for Alan Lomax in the Library of Congress folk song archive, and starting to realize what a wealth of different kinds of music there was in this country that you never heard on the radio.
When I am chopping trees out in the woods because I heat my house with wood, I feel myself right in the middle of God. Mahalia Jackson said "I have seen God. I have seen the sun rise." So, in a sense, when anyone looks in the mirror, they look at an infinitesimally small part of God.
I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.
I'd like to be remembered as the sower of seeds. That's the greatest parable in the bible as far as I'm concerned. Some seeds fall in the pathway, get stomped on and don't grow. Some fall on the stones and don't even sprout, but others fall on the ground and multiply a thousand fold.
Town after town has but one newspaper or one radio station. It is often owned by Murdoch. Yes, we don't have as much freedom of the press as we think we have - although the traditional freedom of speech is strongly rooted in American culture.
Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.
