Country Music Gala Remarks at the Fundraising Performance for Ford's Theatre.

I am really glad to be here tonight to enjoy with you and to celebrate country music. Some people call it, some experts call it indigenous American music, but when I grew up in Plains, Georgia, when we asked for music, we got country music.

Musicians coming out of the South, like the late Mother Maybelle Carter, brought with them songs that had been sung and played for centuries. These were songs that were played for entertainment by people who had to sing them themselves. They were songs that came out of the people's own hearts. Some of those tunes, even some of the words, had been with them since medieval times; others were composed in this country as people walked through the southern mountains or rode a horse or in the back of a mulewagon or sat beside a campfire in the western plains.

The good songs were passed down from generation to generation, because they told stories of how ordinary people lived and felt and loved. As people moved to the cities, they wrote different songs about their own new feelings and new experiences, but even in our day country music has remained people music. Now it's sometimes composed on kitchen tables or in a hotel room or even riding along in a pickup truck or on Greyhound buses or in an 18-wheeler.

Today all kinds of people listen and love country music. Country music is about all kinds of experiences—sad times and bad times, wasted lives, dashed dreams, the dirty dog that took advantage of you. But it also celebrates the good and the permanent times, home and family, faith and trust, love that lasts for a lifetime and sometimes, I admit, love that lasts just for one good time. [Laughter] It's as universal as tears and as personal as a baby's smile.

The country in country music is America. Like jazz and the blues, country music has become a bridge of understanding and good will and friendship from our country to other nations, and so have many of its top talent and top artists.

I want to thank the great performers who've come here tonight to benefit Ford's Theatre. Many of these performers come from cities and towns that are large and as cosmopolitan as Plains, Georgia. [Laughter] And right now I'm going to turn over the program to one of those-from Sevierville, Tennessee, Miss Dorothy Parton. ¹

¹ Popularly known as Dolly Parton.