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.

Well, it's hard not to love Hank Williams!

There's every other guitar player and then there's Chet. He transcended musical boundaries for more than fifty years. God only lays Chet Atkins on you once in a lifetime.

I've been promoting the idea of a Jimmie Rodgers documentary for years.

I saw footage of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley just hanging out together in Memphis when they were young guys getting started at Sun, listening to records together. That was beautiful to me.

The black church in the South is the home of rock & roll.

Well, my heart finally found a home when I married Connie Smith, and I was tired of feeling bad. And it was time to grow up and get on with life.

I'm always on the prowl for the kinds of recordings that can inspire and potentially make a difference.

When times are good, we have tunes to dance to; when times are tough, we're supposed to talk about it. That's country music.

I've always been a collector at heart.

Rock 'n' roll entertained my head but there was something about country music that touched my heart.

When I was 12 years old I discovered Bill Monroe and my dad got me a mandolin.

There wasn't really a lot of difference from a Mississippi perspective between what Elvis did on 'Mystery Train' or 'Milkcow Blues' or what Bill Monroe was playing or what Flatt and Scruggs was playing; it was rock 'n' roll to me.

Hillbilly Rock' was the song that opened the door and gave me a reason to get a bus and a band and cowboy clothes to go out there and figure it out in front of everybody. And the hits started coming.

The Ryman and the Grand Ole Opry, if you're a Southern boy, is just a way of life.

I hate labels.

I make no apology about being a hillbilly.

Growing up in the Sixties, whether it was the Batmobile or the costumes Porter Wagoner wore or the music that came from there, California was the home of what a friend of mine calls 'custom culture.' It seemed like the promised land.

I loved the Rolling Stones. I heard a little bit of country music creeping around the edges of some of their songs. Being a Mississippi kid, I could feel they had done their homework, even when I was a little boy. I could feel the Delta blues influence in a lot of their work.

We need a new Hank Williams, a new Jimmy Webb. We need new writers, a new Tom Petty. We need people that write what they feel and what they see - things that are relevant.

I don't know how it got around that I play a lot of instruments. I really don't. I play the guitar and the mandolin.

After something has run its course, you either become a parody and keep doing it, or tear it down and know the truth about it, warts and all.

As a photographer, God's light in Southern California is something unlike I've ever seen on planet Earth. There's a beauty about it, especially in the afternoon that is so pretty.

The first picture of me that I know of was me in the crib wearing a pair of cowboy boots.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.