Americana Music Quotes

You better get it while you can You better get it while you can If you wait too long, it'll all be gone And you'll be sorry then It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor And it's the same for a woman or a man From the cradle to the crypt Is a mighty short trip So you better get it while you can

Helene Hanff, an aspiring playwright who had been put to work in the Theatre Guild press office, remembered trying to generate some effective publicity for Away We Go! “This was, they told us, the damndest musical ever thought up for a sophisticated Broadway audience,” Hanff wrote. “It was so pure you could put it on at a church social. It opened with a middle-aged farm woman sitting alone on a bare stage churning butter, and from then on it got cleaner.”16 It was the kind of Americana that Larry Hart distrusted. But at the New Haven tryout he tried to keep an open mind. Of the songs in Away We Go!’s first act, five of them—“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “Many a New Day,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” and “Out of My Dreams”—were destined to become instant classics, with “All Er Nuthin’” and “Oklahoma!” delighting the audience in the second act. But Larry wasn’t so delighted. He might have regarded “We know we belong to the land” as a professionally crafted line, as resonant to recent immigrants as to Mayflower descendants; but “The land we belong to is grand”?

Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them—roots Americana, blues, and classic rock—began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they’d once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different—more heartfelt, raw, and organic—and the industry began to take notice.

Playing songs is ageless; the songs never seem to get old. You can sing a song that you wrote twenty or thirty years ago, and it’s like the first time you’ve played it. It makes you feel young, but the reality is, you’re getting older, things are changing inside. . . . somehow performing music cheats age, but the fascination only lasts as long as the song.

“In the Victorian age, he would have been an opium addict. A portrait of Byronic tragedy and Gothic ruin. In the Medieval period, he would have glutted himself on the blood lust and the religious fervor of the Crusades, falling on the twin pyres of courtly love and the denial of self-abstention. In the 1950s, it was quaint Americana, chain-smoking, and drinking. Fast cars, rock music, and fucking,” he spat the word. “He was dying when I turned him. I think he knew.

Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.

A few stations, starting with one owned by AT&T, started broadcasting messages for advertisers. Within a couple of years, AT&T’s broadcast activities had become far more professional. Baseball games and highlights, news reports, music, and other forms of entertainment soon made their way onto the air. AT&T, as the nation’s telephone company, owned an advanced wiring system that enabled small and distant radio broadcasters nationwide to pick up programming from hundreds of miles away—with this, a small station in Maine could pick up a signal from Washington DC via a wire and broadcast the signal to a local audience. Rather than have countless stations develop their own expensive programming, AT&T’s primary station, WEAF, allowed other local stations to broadcast a programming block. With its national infrastructure and early entry into broadcast advertising, AT&T’s national broadcast operation was profitable.