A Quote by Dickey Betts

I'm influenced by Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelly, Roland Kirk, John Coltrane, B.B. King, and then by bluegrass. But when I was 16, bluegrass wasn't cool. We was rock n' rollers then: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis.
Back then, I, most rockers loved Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis... you know in the '60s.
I plug into a lot of old rock & roll. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis - I love all that stuff.
When the fearsome foursome of rock music, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, decided to show up in Toronto for a rock and roll festival, I knew we had to go there to try to get them all on film.
My influences were Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry.
Rock n' roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis - all them people.
Many people we consider legends, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, remain so scarred by scandals, injustices and regrets from decades earlier that they're barely able to appreciate their accomplishments.
You could put Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley on one side of the stage, and James Brown on the other, and you wouldn't even notice the others were there!
The music has to come from bluegrass first. We always said back in the 70s that if you want to play newgrass you have to go through the school of bluegrass. You know, maybe Jack Black can make a movie now called School of Bluegrass . That would be cool.
I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff, Motown and Stooges. But also early rock-and-roll like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. I feel like as I grew older, I've been working with different musicians, people that have are constantly showing me different things.
Over the years, I've come to realize that writing 'I Ain't Living Long Like This' was an exercise in combined musical influence, mostly that of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan - artists no one has ever heard of.
I first met Jimmy Page in London in 1961, and he was listening to James Burton, Scotty Moore and Cliff Gallup with Gene Vincent, as was I ... these were the rock and roll guys who really sparked our interest in the guitar, and later we delved into other things and went different directions ... during my time with Eric Clapton, we talked about what we'd listened to early on, and he was a huge fan of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis
You may not hear much bluegrass on the surface of my music, but I feel the emotion I put in a song comes from bluegrass. Bluegrass taught me to interpret a song, not just sing it.
Shortly after I started in bluegrass, Ricky Skaggs and I got together and the bluegrass career just snowballed. Being 15 or 16 and making good money playing music was pretty attractive.
Isn't my music the last of the real rhythm and blues? Isn't it great? It's because of my musicians, we were weaned on Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, all the founding fathers, the gods of thunder, who invented the foundation and the pulse of the greatest music in the world!
Not to be mean about it, but some great rock and rollers, like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, are pretty one-dimensional.
It's true that bluegrass is a virtuosic form and asks that of its performer. Old-time music is older rawer and purer. It's less stylized. We don't solo. Well sometimes we do, but it's different it has more to do with rock-and-roll than bluegrass does.
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