Key quotes borrowed from the San Diego Folklore Society oages:

We are the Coal Holders

Ever since the cave dwelling beginning, there's always been the guy who's job it was to carry the last hot coal. (Remember?) See, when the tribe moved on, someone had to carry the last hot coal to start up the next fire at the next campsite. They needed this fire to cook with, sleep near, talk and sing around. Now, many of these coal-holders, over time, became folk singers.

Later on, some went electric. Some even became rock and roll singers, punkers and rappers. Hey, different tribes, different instruments. But the job itself has never changed. My dad was one of these guys. And a lot of his songs were pretty damned hot!

We are Woody's coal-holders. We do this to keep our present day tribe warm, fed, and informed.

Sometimes it gets real cold out there (Have you noticed?) and it seems like a chilly wind is just going to blow us all off the map.

A lot of people are feeling the effects of the chill; no food, no shelter, no singing, no rights. And other people are chilling inside; no warmth, no joy, no song, no tribe.

Coal-holders are real important right now!

They will be the ones who will make it possible to build the next fire. They will be the ones to serve up our next hot meal or our next warm talk. And though it seems that there are no bonfires burning just yet, I do feel that things are warming up!

--Nora Guthrie

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WHY DO WE CARE?

"When someone asks, why all this fuss and bother, this endless trouble and expenditure of time on an old song, the answer is: because this old song, in its mere, sheer commonness, strikes to our very roots. There is no obligation on these old things to survive. They have lived on in the minds and hearts of countless men and women, untainted by compulsion, for the purest and most disinterested reason possible to be conceived: because they have continued to give joy and solace, on the basic levels of artistic experience, to generation after generation of our humankind.

'The proper study of mankind is man, and so long as this precept remains valid, folk song will continue to be an important subject for human inquiry."

--Bertrand Bronson



"The piano may do for lovesick girls who lace themselves to skeletons and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo, when you want genuine music, music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose--when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!"

-- Mark Twain