I SAW MIKE [Seeger] play without the Ramblers… . He played all the instruments, whatever the song called for -- the banjo, the fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, and the guitar; even harmonica in the rack. Mike was skin-stinging. He was tense, poker-faced and radiated telepathy, wore a snowy white shirt and silver sleeve bands. …Being there and seeing him up close, something hit me. It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them. I was so absorbed in listening to him that I wasn’t even aware of myself. What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood. Nobody could just learn this stuff, and it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns…that I would have to start believing possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale…that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.
Bob Dylan, from Chronicles