40 Quotes by Tom Glazer

I met my wife in Washington, D.C. I was a senior in college. WW II was about to descend upon us. Jobs were starting to open up after a prolonged depression.

In the 50s, I wrote the lyrics to an old melody called Melody of Love, which was number one for a while. It later turned into a major hit.

When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.

I’m afraid I talk a lot, too much, perhaps. I should have been a lawyer or a college professor or a windy politician, though I’m glad I am not any of these.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or ’31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn’t keep up the payments.

Technically, I’ve been retired for some time now. All I ever do is occasionally write songs for friends, such as one, for a friend who had just turned 80. I wrote a song for him called, The First 80 Years are The Hardest.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don’t know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

As I grew up, I was interested in other areas, too, especially literature. It became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me as to whether to major in music or literature. It wasn’t until my 30s that I began a profession in music.

I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women’s liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.