What I discovered all over Ireland is that people living simple lives by the sea or in the remote countryside seem a lot calmer than city folk with their iPads and their Android phones.
I absolutely love American folk art, can't get enough of it.
One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
As a white queer person of a certain degree of economic privilege, I think that my ability to pass as straight is a privilege that other folk I know don't have. It's important to keep in mind who really is in the most trouble and to direct our attention to assisting those people.
You can see it on the Internet: There's an argument going on continually about, 'What is folk music?' And I don't really want to get involved in that. It's an endless argument, a 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' kind of argument.
My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.
I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later.
Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.
Our appreciation of folk art will strengthen our identities, our pride in belonging to a community. People trained in the creative use of their hands soon acquire skills, excellent craftsmanship which will be the most important measure of how well we can industrialize.
In 'Spinal Tap,' there's the fake historical quality of 'Stonehenge.' It's something the musicians look at with a mystical reverence. In folk music, it's the seriousness with which these people approach their 'art.'
Both 'The Wire' and 'Queer as Folk' had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time.
I grew up listening to popular music. My father was a Peruvian folk singer. He played the guitar at home. He sang songs with a waltzing rhythm, yet you can still hear the Spanish influences. I accompanied him to his performances.
I grew up in a largely black community during the '70s and '80s that scoffed at 'white' music. That music - folk, rock, some disco - was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian's desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand.
I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.
I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.
I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs.
Cornwall has lots of folk and Celtic music and has that kind of surfer vibe as well. That was my kind of upbringing.
Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.
I was on the dole once. I loved it. It was only for a couple of years, when I was 20 or 21 and playing in a band. Back then, this was something young folk did - you got your rent paid, a little bit of money to live on, and you loafed around, wrote songs, rehearsed and dreamed of playing Wembley Stadium.
I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.
We don't need to bring down the rich folk to help the poor.
Nobody would take me seriously. They would take one look at me and say, 'O.K., folk singer.' That was really hard for me, and I was angry a lot of the time. I did all these summer programs, and I never encountered another female playing jazz guitar. Ever.
Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.
My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible.
A good folk song tells you something you already know, in a form you're already familiar with, on terms that were set down long before you were born - when the country was primarily windblown dust, open wagon trains, and dysfunctional towns like Deadwood.
I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.
From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes.
Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.
'Queer as Folk' is gay gay gay gay gay.
Banjos are used in Celtic, English folk music and obviously American music. But not that much in pop music. But it's more versatile than people realise it to be. It's a beautiful instrument, very rhythmic and melodic. You can do anything with it.
I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties. I spent quite a bit of time in choirs growing up, and in the world-touring music group, Anuna. It's a sound with very rich texture, voices singing together.
I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.
I meet people from really grand backgrounds who had horrible parents who took no interest in them, whereas I'm a working-class boy from Deptford who was worshipped by all my rellies. Everybody in my extended family helped to raise me, and I realise now how lucky I was to grow up among kind folk.
I've always thought about myself as somewhat of a folk musician. I just write words. I don't think I'm even a musician. I don't play a lot of instruments, not really a soloist or anything.