I've always been a sucker for a truck driving song.

I learned things by being in Lester Flatts' band, and I learned things by playing with Johnny Cash, and I learned from Pop Staples. I'm a sponge.

It's hard for a country performer to make a living in a Beatles society.

Merle Haggard once said, 'I'm really mad at Glen Campbell because he's the most talented human being in the world.' That kind of summed it up. Merle didn't miss!

One of the most quotable guys ever in country music was Grandpa Jones.

People shouldn't be punished for their wisdom.

Well, the first band was at nine, and I was on the road when I was 12 with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers.

I think the way country music is set up, we all came from a family background.

My main electric guitar belonged to Clarence White, the great guitarist for the Byrds.

I swear, there is Capitol Studios and then there's every other studio on the planet Earth. It is the ultimate, paramount of sound in the United States of America. It is a magical place.

One of the people I heard early on in his career was Eric Church. I liked him and his music.

When we lost Glen Campbell, we lost an American original. We also lost a really good man.

I've always loved gospel music. Being raised in Mississippi, it was kind of part of the atmosphere down there.

Well, being from Mississippi, the church house is kind of the common denominator. It was for me growing up. Like so many public performers, that was the first place I was ever invited to sing.

Coming from bluegrass background, I totally understand family harmonies.

I never claimed to be a great photographer.

I figure I'm a mandolin player first and foremost, and everything else I've accomplished is just a scam.

It is great to know that the lives and careers of country music's artists are being documented through the Hall of Fame's expert archival and curatorial resources.

Country music has taken so many forms, and I've always contended that it does not matter if the casual listener falls in love with country music through Florida Georgia Line, Taylor Swift, Old Crow Medicine Show or whomever - just get in and start digging!

When country music is doing its job, it reports on the good, bad and indifferent of our human condition.

After people work hard and cope with the pressures of life throughout the week, going out to a show or tuning in to watch some characters in cowboy clothes, singing and playing songs about real life is something I relate to.

There's something cool about playing 'Tempted' and then picking up the mandolin and playing 'Dark as a Dungeon' and standing on the classics. It's nice to just let soul rule.

When I pick up Hank Williams' guitar or that first suit that Johnny Cash wore on stage, it empowers me.

Nobody in my school knew who Bill Monroe was, or Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and barely Johnny Cash. Nobody spoke that language. I proceeded to get myself kicked out.

If you look at just right, there's not a nickel's worth of difference between what Buck Owens and the Buckaroos played on 'Buckaroo' and what the Ventures were playing. It's all that twangy instrumental stuff.

Pop Staples was one of my true mentors.

Anybody that looks at my photography, it blows my mind because it's my last hobby.

I used to watch those syndicated, black-and-white Country Music Television shows from the '60s with my dad. And all of those people that played on our television set, they just felt like family to me. And I believed in my heart, as a little kid, that I would be doing that someday and I would know all those people and we would be friends.

Growing up in Mississippi, the first song that I ever remember hearing, that captivated my mind and transported me from my bedroom out to the West, is a song called 'Don't Take Your Guns to Town' by Johnny Cash. That's when I was 5-years-old. And I played that song over and over again. I pantomimed it in school for show-and-tell.

I love playing music with Duane Eddy.

I got to Nashville on Labor Day weekend in 1972. And the Grand Ole Opry is still there, the Country Music Hall of Fame is still there. And the roots of country music are still there. It's where the authenticity and the empowering force lies.

Country music as a genre, as an art form, is just as valid out there in the pantheon of the arts as classical, jazz, ballet, whatever.

I can't remember when I didn't have an instrument around.

Well, I was dedicated to God before I was born by Momma and Daddy, and I was raised in a very traditional Southern Baptist home.

Like so many other people I was raised right, went crazy but I always knew God had His hand on me.

When I was 5 years old, I got my first record. It was 'Flatt & Scruggs' Greatest Hits.' The second was 'The Fabulous Johnny Cash.'

I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.

I'm really taken by the fact that my photographs live on somebody's wall.

He is irreplaceable. Even in death I have no doubt that Johnny Cash will continue to live on as an inspiration to musicians and songwriters and all of America.

Shaft' is a great country song.

Crazy Arms' is one of those songs that can get crushed beneath its own weight. It's kind of like 'Orange Blossom Special' or 'Rocky Top' or 'Crazy.' But when you go back to the original interpretation, you hear it in a new way.

American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.

We need all those divisions of country music, firing on all cylinders.

I haven't been to bed since 1972.

My mother named me for Marty Robbins.

The first Nudie suits I bought were two hundred bucks.

Some things you can never get back.

More than anybody in the music industry, the Staple Singers were like family to me.

To me, all music that is made under the umbrella of the United States of America is Americana music.

Well, the things that country music is parodied for sometimes - trains, drinking, sin, cheating, redemption, jailhouses, rambling, hoboing, on and on, all those things - according to The New York Times, every one of those subject matters is still relevant.