Source: Wall Street Journal

“To me,” he explained in a recent phone conversation, “country’s an obvious kind of leap once you get sanctified into the world of rock ‘n’ roll, and it overtakes you like it overtook me—when I first heard Little Richard, Elvis and then Johnny Cash. I started to find out where they came from, their influences. And for me, it seems like the honky-tonks that were home for country artists like Buck Owens, Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell were simply made for one kind of blue-collar culture and ethnicity, just as the juke joints were for the African-Americans who also were working in fields and mills and moving up North to get more work. I don’t see any difference, finally, between Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters, whom I met and even became friends with when I got deep into blues, and their tremendous sense of both tradition and the present, and George Jones or Hank Williams.”

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