“Folk songs are evasive.” They offer “the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we ant it to be.” Their lesson? “If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that’s still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.”

“The sociologist were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young – that their attention spans were being dragged down. Maybe that’s true but the three minute song also did the same thing.”

The Civil War was when “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected…would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”