Americana Music Quotes

As the crew began lighting up their cigars and pipes, they could hear the ragtime music of Scott Joplin being performed by the colored composer himself enlivening the atmosphere with a jubilant feeling of gaiety, hope, and promise.

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

“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.

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heck, no one knows if the internet will still be around in ten years— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber This is about the music and the bands who made it. And this is about all those unlikely people who became stars and then fell from the sky and had to scratch out a living to make ends meet at some crap job when their hit machine ran dry and their money ran out. And it’s about the fans who played their music on their first date, and their first prom, and when they cruised the street in their first car. The fans who cried during their first breakup, or first divorce, who jumped for joy during the birth of their child, or first big promotion. This is about the people who want to remember the good times— and the bad, I guess— and relive a happier time when they still had rock ‘n’ roll, and they still had something to believe in. That’s what this website is about. It’s not only about where they are now — or about the money— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber Rockers were pretty good at unzipping their fly on their own. They didn’t need a snot-nosed journalist to unzip it for them— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber You keep thinking this band will turn up, and maybe they will. But if you ain’t found ‘em yet, it’s a good bet your band has drowned…. Every band gets swept out to sea at one time or another. Most make it back to shore, but some don’t. I think your band has drowned and you ain’t never gonna see ‘em again— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber Be careful… The First Cut is the Deepest, as Rod Stewart once sang. But the second cut is pretty deep too— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber I knew them well enough. I knew they were as dysfunctional as any band I ever worked with. Although, I don’t think they used the word dysfunctional back then. I think they used words like screwed up—Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber Seems she was more agreeable to you being here. For my part, I wanted to put you both in a sack and drop you into Lake Winona— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber Yeah, well. One man’s truth can be another man’s dagger to the heart— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber People move on, Jonathan. Rock music moved on. It was never gonna last. You write for a rock magazine. You of all people should know that… Yes, but it didn’t disappear without a trace— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber Fame, money, prestige, power. It’s what we think we want until we find out how it destroys as easily as it helps. I know that from personal experience— Rock-IT! Towne by Mark Streuber