JJ: How did Americana emerge as a theme for the music? As I was writing this book [Waging Heavy Peace], I wrote about a time in the mid ’60s. I was in a place called Thunder Bay, Ontario, playing with a group called the Squires. I had just recently left home and this was really my first big trip out of Winnipeg. We had our own vehicle and were making our way in the world. We were working in a club called the Fourth Dimension. A band came through called the Thorns, which featured their leader Tim Rose. He’s a seminal figure in music who has gone largely unnoticed. While he didn’t write “Hey Joe,” the huge hit that Hendrix had, he was the one who defined how to do it. But he also had this thing called folk rock. It was the movement of the day, and defined mainly by the Thorns’ version of “Oh Susannah.” I heard that version and it blew my mind. I taught the Squires that version, but then I enlarged upon it and started arranging all kinds of folk songs, taking the same liberties and having the same freedoms. In doing that, we found ourselves with a pretty solid repertoire of that kind of song. Neil Young Wall Street Journal/John Jurgensen June 8, 2012

The Squires played my own songs and rock arrangements of folk classics like “Oh, Susanna,” “Tom Dooley,” and “Clementine.” We got that idea from the Thorns, another band that came through on the circuit. We learned their arrangement of “Oh, Susanna,” and I developed a theme doing other old folk songs along that way, with new melodies and arrangements that rocked. Tim Rose, leader of the Thorns, was one of those credited with writing “Hey Joe,” later made a big hit by Jimi Hendrix. The Thorns were really great. I don’t know what happened to them. They should have been huge. But we know life has her ways. Nothing is obvious, and you never know what is going to happen. The Thorns and Danny and the Memories were great bands that could have been huge, but just disappeared. Who knows what is next or why it isn’t? Neil Young Waging Heavy Peace Sept 2012