I am a man of constant sorrow. I've seen trouble all my days.

I'm a member of the Primitive Baptist Church, and they will buy every CD that I have released, but they don't me just to bring the instruments much into the church.

I like for it to be mountain music or old-time country music or traditional bluegrass. Either one will fit me. It's traditional, basically.

My mother played a little bit of the old time clawhammer. She tuned the banjo up and picked one tune for me, and it just become natural to me. When she picked it, I just started and picked it, too.

I think Bob [Dylan] told me that he turned down twenty interviews that year, and I was the only one that he sat down and did an interview with. And, he said that it was one of his highlights, and it was one of my highlights. And, I was very glad to talk with Bob. I found out that he was a good fan of mine, and that tickled me.

My father was a logger. He cut timber and hauled it out of the woods and had a sawmill. They sawed it into lumber. And, you know, the mines needed things they call timbers and collars and so forth, and they used collars on the railroad track that they put the rails on. And he - that was his occupation, just a sawmill man and a logger.

I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it's down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it's sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way.