“For those on the path to discovering American roots music, Roscoe Holcomb’s sound seems to be the end of the line. Listeners may start with bluegrass, folk songs, old-time string bands, or Appalachian ballads, but once they get ot his music, there is no next step.” John Cohen, (From the liner notes to “An Untamed Sense of Control.”)
“Almost any line you could draw through the whole field of popular musical culture would have Alan Lomax somewhere on it – probably in several places. Without Lomax, it’s possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles, no Stones, and no Velvet Undergound’.” Brian Eno, (Quoted in the CD booklet of “The Alan Lomax Popular Songbook.”)
“The first CD I got after The Harry Smith Anthology was the Folkways stuff with Dock Boggs in the 1960’s. I put it on the stereo for the first time, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I just burst into tears. I sobbed openly for a while. And then I collected myself and thought … “My musical tastes have CHANGED.” Mike Seeger, (Quoted in “The Young Musicologist,” in The Celestial Monochord: Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues
Old Time Party 