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It's really rare that you come across a Southern character that's not stereotyped, vilified or aggrandized.

We don't see the people who are doing real things getting enough props. We often see politicians who are everywhere but nowhere at the same goddamn time. You know the kind of person: You see them everywhere on television but nowhere in front of your face.

It's a very smart, progressive bunch, these people that make country music. They're not country hicks sitting behind a desk with a big cigar giving out record deals and driving round in Cadillacs with cattle horns on the front grille: it's a bunch of really wonderful, open-minded, great people down on Music Row that make this music.

Well not really to get attention, but to entertain, but you know to show some elements of rural life as well, it kind of blended all in, its kind of like a mockery in a sense, kind of stab back at people that have those stereotypical ideas of the south.

There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.

There's something sort of intrinsic in being a Southerner that doesn't go away. You can't get rid of it, but it's not something that's terribly obvious.

I think most of America is seeing the strings behind the campaign, and sees the crass political maneuvers that people are making. I mean, they're extremely apparent to me.

Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.

Maybe it's true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn't offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.