In the Country of Country Quotes

“As a performer, Cash aroused an audience, not in the overtly sexual way that Elvis did, but with something darker and more disturbing. For all his songs about a man being wronged by a scarlet woman, there was also always the suspicion that Cash had been into something malevolent, and deserved his pain. What kind of person, after all, bragged about shooting strangers just for sport (“I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die”), as the singer does in “Folsom Prison Blues,” his second hit single? Elvis was pretty. Cash was the first punk rocker.”
― Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music

“country people play their feeling and feel their playing.”
― Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music