Robin Williamson Quotes

What we were doing in '65 was something quite different. What I was doing, in my mind, as a good place to start, is that I was carrying on in a direct line from more like from Jack Kerouac, in one way. And from traditional singers in Britain, as well as old-timey American music, a kind of mixture of those things. The main singers I liked in Britain were Jeannie Robertson, the Scottish singer, and a number of other people that were tradition-bearers in Scotland and in Ireland. But I worked with Tom Paley from the New Lost City Ramblers when he came over to Britain. That's why I first began playing fiddle, really, was with him. So that was an old-timey element as well.
Robin Williamson

What I feel I contributed really to the period 1964-65 was a kind of a... it's kind of like fools rushing in where angels feared to tread. I wanted to be the one over the hill rather than the one that built the city. I wanted to have a go at a number of different things. It struck me that you could write a spontaneous, free-form lyric, a la Jack Kerouac. And then you could link it up with spontaneous free-form music, drawn from the various regions of the world. So you have like an Indian bit, a Spanish bit, a light opera bit, an African bit, and you could use all those things like tonal colors, and have a bit of a go on various instruments and so on. Plus then, of course, the whole notion of guitar tunings was a very important thing in Britain, with Bert Jansch and John Renbourn and Davy Graham, who had opened up the sort of DADGAD world, of DADGAD tuning. But we began, in the String Band, to use a lot of different tunings, minor tunings and different kinds of modal tunings.
Robin Williamson