| The truest expression of a people
is in its dance and music | Agnes de Mile | 20/03/2018 |
| It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure | Albert Einstein | 07/06/2020 |
| After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music | Aldous Huxley | 06/03/2018 |
| I love all those great F-words – feminism, folk music… | Ani DiFranco | 20/06/2021 |
| Never get one of those cheap tin whistles. It leads to much harder drugs, like pipes and flutes | anon | 09/01/2025 |
| Can you play Over the Hills and Far Away? Then please do | anon | 09/01/2025 |
There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
For he said, “It appears
That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune” | Arthur Eddington | 22/11/2022 |
| Without a song or a dance what are we? | Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus (Thank You for the Music) | 13/08/2023 |
| Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life | Berthold Auerbach | 06/03/2018 |
| New Rule: Stop calling bagpipes a musical instrument. They’re actually a Scottish breathalyzer test. You blow into one end, and if the sound that comes out the other end doesn’t make you want to kill yourself you’re not drunk enough | Bill Maher | 24/07/2023 |
| Folk music is a bunch of fat people | Bob Dylan | 16/07/2023 |
| One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain | Bob Marley | 06/03/2018 |
| What I like about pop music, and why I’m still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music | Bono | 16/07/2023 |
| Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without | Confucius | 06/03/2018 |
| You can do anything to music – it doesn’t mind | Dave Swarbrick | 21/03/2018 |
| He had a bike and he got about a bit | Dave Swarbrick on lusty Scottish fiddler Scott Skinner | 03/11/2022 |
| After a tune is played, the notes just float away – there’s nothing to tidy up | David Phillpot | 21/03/2018 |
| Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe | Douglas Adams | 06/03/2018 |
| Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies | Edward Bulwer-Lytton | 07/06/2020 |
| Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid | Frank Zappa | 07/06/2020 |
| Without music, life would be a mistake | Friedrich Nietzsche | 06/03/2018 |
| Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the world | Friedrich Nietzsche | 20/06/2021 |
| There is no feeling,
except the extremes of fear and grief,
that does not find relief in music | George Eliot | 20/03/2018 |
| Where words fail, music speaks | Hans Christian Andersen | 31/07/2019 |
| The only truth is music | Jack Kerouac | 06/03/2018 |
| Without music, life would be a blank to me | Jane Austen | 06/03/2018 |
| When the music’s over, turn out the lights | Jim Morrison (When the Music’s Over) | 26/09/2018 |
| ‘Ah, music,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘A magic beyond all we do here!’ | JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) | 13/09/2018 |
| I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music | John Lydon [aka Johnny Rotten] | 06/03/2018 |
| A lot of English traditional music is guesswork anyway, so it’s very difficult for people to be vehemently opposed to experimenting with it | John Spiers | 04/11/2022 |
| When people tell me, ‘God has blessed you with the gift of music’, you’re damn right I get offended. I did not practise hours a day for eighteen years to have my success attributed to a myth | Josh Groban | 15/06/2018 |
| All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself | JS Bach | 09/01/2025 |
| Country is based on folk music, which has been around for centuries. So has the plague | Karen Chance | 16/07/2023 |
| Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones | Keith Richards | 06/03/2018 |
| Do you know that our soul
is composed of harmony? | Leonardo DaVinci | 20/03/2018 |
| If it was never new and it never gets old then it’s a folk song | Llewyn Davis | 20/06/2021 |
| All music is folk music: I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song | Louis Armstrong | 06/03/2018 |
| Music is a higher revelation
than all wisdom and philosophy.
Music is the electrical soil
in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents | Ludwig van Beethoven | 20/03/2018 |
| My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues | Mark Knopfler | 06/03/2018 |
| Tunes help you breathe more easily | Mars Ltd | 25/08/2018 |
| I’m not interested in heritage – this stuff is alive | Martin Carthy | 20/03/2018 |
| I was involved in the Great Folk Music scare back in the sixties, when it almost caught on | Martin Mull | 20/06/2021 |
| Folk music has always contained a concern for the human condition | Mary Travers | 16/07/2023 |
| Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances | Maya Angelou | 31/07/2019 |
| This is a book for every fiddler who has realised halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it | Neil Gaiman (The Good Fairies of New York) | 02/11/2023 |
| Music is an act of love | Pat Higgins | 09/01/2025 |
| Folk music has pretty powerful medicine for changing your heart | Paul Stookey | 06/03/2018 |
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs,
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music | Percy Bysshe Shelley | 30/07/2019 |
| The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be | Pete Seeger | 12/01/2023 |
| Life without music would be like a human being without sense | Pharrell Williams | 12/01/2023 |
| Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything | Plato | 06/03/2018 |
| The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation | Ralph Vaughan Williams | 09/01/2025 |
| The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles | Ralph Waldo Emerson | 22/11/2022 |
| If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together | Richard Nixon (evidently a stranger to the keys C, Am & F# pentatonic) | 12/01/2023 |
No shindig is half complete without that famous polka beat
That’s why they invite me, I suppose
Waltzes, strathspeys, eightsome reels, now you know how good it feels
Crank that handle babe, away she goes | Richard Thompson (Don’t sit on my Jimmy Shands) | 26/09/2018 |
| Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence | Robert Fripp | 06/03/2018 |
| The way I see it, rock’n’roll is folk music | Robert Plant | 16/07/2023 |
| Music [is] a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health exempt from present anguish; nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining | Samuel Pepys (~1700) | 13/07/2025 |
| In Shetland they have more fiddles per head than anywhere else on earth… so they’re never short of firewood | Simon Nicol | 06/11/2022 |
| For even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, and another mad, strikes me in a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer, there is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers | Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) | 09/01/2025 |
| There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard | Sun Tzu (what would he have made of Gweilos’ tricksy 7-note scales?) | 12/01/2023 |
| But this didn’t feel like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music | Terry Pratchett (Soul Music) | 04/11/2022 |
| The accordionist played a long drawn-out chord, the legal signal that a Morris Dance is about to begin, and people who hang around after this have only got themselves to blame | Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith) | 06/06/2020 |
| Hark the Herald Tribune sings
Advertising wondrous things | Tom Lehrer (A Christmas carol) | 06/03/2018 |
We are the folk song army
Every one of us cares
We all hate poverty, war and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares | Tom Lehrer (Folk Song Army) | 16/07/2023 |
| I know only two tunes: one of them is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn’t | Ulysses S Grant | 22/11/2022 |
| If music is a place then jazz is the city, folk is the wilderness, rock is the road, classical is a temple | Vera Nazarin | 12/01/2023 |
| Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent | Victor Hugo | 06/03/2018 |
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus | William Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice) | 31/07/2019 |
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die | William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night) | 06/03/2018 |
| It’s a folk singer’s job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people | Woody Guthrie | 06/03/2018 |
