You know, I really feel a responsibility to the music, and I teach workshops in music sometimes. And folks do come to me and they go, 'How do I make this blues song my own? How do I feel like I'm not an impostor doing this?' And I'm like, 'That's an excellent question.' That's where you should start, where you go, 'How does this speak to me?'

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you're on.

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

Every song has a heart, and I just go for that.

I like Queen Latifah.

I'm still black in the eyes of America.

We have to talk about the negativity, but we have to enjoy the beauty of what this country, culturally, has done.

It's not about me, it's about the music. I don't do this because I want to be a star. I don't do this because I want to make a lot of money.

What's really interesting to me is to have a connection to what was going on in the past, but to make it a living thing.

The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?

Nobody can know what their legacy is going to be, you know?

I would be thrilled with anybody who cites my work as something that inspired them.

The best part of a MacArthur is having some pressure taken off from touring relentlessly.

The truth, the real history, is way more interesting and representative of what America actually is.

I kind of have found my identity through the music, through the roots music of North Carolina, and kind of realized that that's my identity as a North Carolinian.

Ibn Said's autobiography is an extraordinary work, and his story is one that's absolutely crucial to tell.

It's really funny how I've come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.

There are people who have incredible stories that we don't talk about. People who did amazing things, men and women who faced incredible odds, and there's nothing wrong with them being heroes for once, you know?

African-American history is American history.

To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.

I don't have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.

I don't consider myself at the kind of stature of somebody who can play five cities on a tour, and that's it. I go where I'm wanted, and I've always had the rural areas of the country. We've always gone there, since the Carolina Chocolate Drops. There's a fan base that's there, and if I can afford to do it, I do it.

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the '90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It's a great art form.

It's kind of remarkable, everything that's happened to me. It's been such a whirlwind, but in a good way.

When I got into college, I got into operatic vocalists, like Leontyne Price.

I've always liked women singers and appreciate a good story being told. That's what country music used to do on the radio.

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.

People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.

I have to continue to work, and I have to be touring, because that's how I earn a living.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

I'm discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had on European music and culture.

When you are a commercial music artist, your music depends on your popularity.

There is music out there that is commercially driven, whether you like it or not. That's a peculiarly American innovation. We innovated the commercial music business.

In the commercial music world, the folk world, we sell records and concert tickets - this is the way I make a living. You go out, you make your art and hopefully people will put their money down for it. But it's getting hard. I have to be on the road so much to keep the lights on.

I love being on the road and I love my band, but also need to be with my kids more and I need to be creating more.

Music affects people in a way that bare facts can't.

I couldn't stand the politics in opera.

I don't watch 'Game of Thrones.' I don't watch TV. I don't watch Hulu.

I love singing opera, but the world surrounding it is not me. I want to be barefoot. I want to be in control of my own career. I want to put on a show. In the opera world, you wait for people to call you until you get to a certain level. In the folk world, it's a lot easier to have control from the beginning.

For me the bare feet are grounding. I'm connected to the Earth in a way that I cannot be any other way.

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.

When you sit at the feet of an elder, it changes you.

Black women have historically had the most to lose and have therefore been the fiercest fighters for justice.

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

My dad's white, my mom's black, and I've struggled with being mixed race.

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

I stood on people's shoulders, so I want to be there for somebody else to take it even further.