People were talking about songs of the common man in order to make the common man. With Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, they were so common it was just uncommon.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.
The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.
I've just always been around great songwriters. To me, they were the standard.
Where I came from in the country, there was no place to hear pop music like Little Richard and people like that. Later, I heard James Brown, Otis Redding, The Drifters, The Four Aces, The Ink Spots.
We have that storytelling history in country and bluegrass and old time and folk music, blues - all those things that combine to make up the genre. It was probably storytelling before it was songwriting, as far as country music is concerned. It's fun to be a part of that and tip the hat to that. You know, and keep that tradition alive.
I listened to the rock music of that time, but as you know and can easily hear: my music of that era had nothing to do with the common music of this era. I was experimenting, I was searching for something new.
To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.
Most of the people who write pop music were outsiders at some time in their life.
I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.
In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.
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