Robbie Robertson Music Quotations

I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.

I asked Bob Dylan to paint the album cover for 'Music from Big Pink.' He said, 'Yeah, let me see what I can come up with.'

The native music of North America, the original-roots music of this country, is also the underworld music of this country.

I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.

Music isn't necessarily made to last, and there's always been disposable music.

My mother told me when I was a toddler and in the crib that they would have music playing, and the thing when I lit up was boogie-woogie or something out of the Louie Jordan period of sometimes big bands, and then all kinds of things.

Think about the number of people who do film music, make records and have a Native American heritage - and I may be the only one on the list.

When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away.

I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.

In 1966, when we were playing that music, ... people were flipping out with anger at that music and hated it.

The Band is probably the ultimate example of people taking all kinds of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folk music to on and on and on and on and putting them all in this big pot and mixing up a new gumbo.

In ?66 when we were playing that music, people were flipping out with anger at that music and hated it. Then we?re doing it a few years later, and people said, ?This is the real deal, and we knew it all along.

Chuck Berry told me if it wasn't for Louis Jordan, he wouldn't have probably ever even got into music. That Louis Jordan changed everything and made him want to become a musician.

I think that there's always great music being made. Always has been, always will be.

Music should never be harmless.