“And then Earl Scruggs comes along and transforms the banjo into a virtuosic modern instrument. For the first time, the Southern banjo style becomes the identity of the banjo, and everything from before is wiped off of people’s consciousness by the power of that explosion.”

There are a lot of chapters to the banjo’s history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it’s a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin.

Being from New York, I wonder why am I inspired by bluegrass and Earl Scruggs? But when I look at the whole history of the banjo, I feel really good about it, including the Earl Scruggs part.

I always try to work with people who are better than me, so I can learn more.

I learned that I’m so busy with what I’m doing, so focused on what I’m doing, that I miss a lot of opportunities for interacting with people.

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn’t actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake.

When I play my own music, or when I play new music, there’s much more stress and intensity of thinking about how I’m going to make it work!

Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn’t gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.

Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn’t gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.

I don’t know enough about hip-hop, though I’ve heard some great hip-hop. I just did a thing with Qwest Love – we did a performance together in Memphis at the Folk Alliance Festival, and we had a great jam and a conversation.

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I doubt anybody would have pushed me [on the music]. When I was at Sony nobody ever gave me any creative suggestions on the music.

I think I’m getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.

I think the musical evolution I’ve gone through has come from all the work with the material.

There is a tendency to want to isolate a little bit, from people that might look at me from a fan position, because it’s hard to be a real person around them, and I really want that when I’m not out on tour and in that sort of public eye.

He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

I have a tight-knit Southern family.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.