Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular."

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can't save the community you have seen?

RULERS should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung.

But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail.

One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!

Plagiarism is basic to all culture