Quotes

Working people have always known that songs are a good way to say what you got to say about work, wages, school, cats, love, marriage, keeping house, or doctor bills. If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter. If the going gets tough, the songs get tougher.

[When asked why he'd scrawled "This Machine Kills Fascists" across the front of his guitar] Well, you see this guitar makes me feel like beatin' the Fascists, and then that makes me sing how much I hate 'em. When I sing for a bunch of folks, folks workin', for soliders, sailors, seamen, that sort of makes all of us whip it up a little. Then we all get to feelin' a little more like beatin' 'em, and 'course if a fascist then just sort of happens to get in our way, he just naturally comes out loser. That's all.

I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.

[from a scribbled lyric discovered in a notebook in his archives] I am the works, the whole works. The saint, the sinner, the drinker, the thinker.

It's a folk singer's job to comfort disturbed people and to disturb comfortable people