Tom Paxton Quotes

I was one of the first. It didn't occur to me at the time. It was just, I had begun to write a lot, and I was writing pretty much in the folk genre. I mean, I certainly had examples of people like Woody [Guthrie] and Pete [Seeger] and Ewan MacColl. I mean, there were people writing songs. But I was one of the first of my generation to do it. It just didn't strike me as anything unique at the time. And of course, I was singing many of the songs that I was writing. But it really was many years before my shows consisted of nothing but my own songs. I did a lot of traditional songs, I did Guthrie songs, I did some of Pete's, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and stuff like that. But all the time I was writing, when I'd write a new song, I'd try it out in the show and see how it went. Gradually, there came to be enough songs of a good quality that I could just do my own stuff. But it was a long time before that really happened.
Tom Paxton