I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.
Interpretation
Music should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or financial status.
Rhiannon Giddens emphasizes the necessity of making music an accessible experience for all people, transcending geographical and financial barriers. This quote highlights the cultural significance of music and the importance of inclusivity in ensuring that individuals from all walks of life can experience and benefit from the arts.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech advocating for community music programs.
When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.
I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.
In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.
The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?
Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!
Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I'm back to being the poet I always thought I was.
Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world's not.
You are either born a writer or you are not.
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
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