This is an interview that was included in the liner notes of Argentinisima CD. I have made a translation of the Spanish text.

Segment from an interview performed by Julio Marbiz, when he was the Director of the Folklore Magazine, back in 1961.

For some time we intended to ask a series of questions to Waldo de los Rios to know him deeper in some aspects. Thus, we wanted to show how this young man thinks, owner of an important musical culture that has taken him to the forefront of the public esteem. That is, by his own gravitational pull of his ability. We knew him honest, sincere, courageous. Hence our interest was based on "certain" questions.

Why don't you considered yourself a folk artist?

Because I do believe that I am a musician with some natural folk influences and not a folklorist with the music pretensions. I've never worried about doing folk music, modern music or symphonic music. I just simply try to make good music. Then, through the result, the listener can judge my work as good or bad folk music, good or bad modern music, good or bad orchestral music, but never solely and purely as the work of a folk artist, because I am not and never pretended to be.

Does your current artistic stand achieves the objective that you have drawn in your beginnings?

The truth is that I never traced any objective (artistically, that is), that served as an impetus to work. You don't lay out as objective breathing to live and, naturally, you do it and the best you can; well, for me is as necessary and natural writing music as breathing. I know that this need has nothing to do with what you call my artistic stand, limited by interests, value, pose, advertising, etcetera.

Do you find in our country ample scope for the development of your artistic concerns?

Yes sir. I find ample scope, what I don't find is a way for the landowner to let me go in to work on it.

Musically, are you satisfied what you have done? If not, what would you like to do?

As false modesty is the worst form of pedantry, I must say that, overall, I am satisfied with what I have done. It would be foolish to pretend that I ignore the significance that my work had here and in other countries. In our country, in terms of folk music, until me and Astor Piazzola appeared, we lived in a complete backwardness in terms of musical techniques, but thanks to the war declared on the score and in front of the microphones, we have not only achieved introduce ourselves to the public opinion, but also we have encouraged other artists to follow our path, creating - and is not adventurous to say - a new esthetic position towards our music.

Does Marta de los Ríos currently weighs in the career of Waldo de los Ríos?

Marta de los Ríos as a woman - not a mother - is a sacred monster that when she sings and performs, magnetizes and frightens the listener, and just hearing her you get to see her as one of the last representants of that generation of artists of blood and race, with no false pretenses, posturing or hypocritical presentations, which Argentina has lost. You may not know what it means to live next to such a volcano, but now you can understand how couldn't have much gravity in my career, whether a gesture or a word from her are a whole compendium of experience, of natural wisdom, in short, to "to be back with all".

What do you expect of our country?

If you mean what the country can do for me now, I don't expect anything, because a human life is too short to assess the true results of a work. I will not attend my real failure or my real victory, and this will be when, within two hundred years or more, my music is heard; if that happens, I would have succeeded. If not, I will have failed and actually I am dead. Hence, neither criticism nor praise can move me enough to waste my time in self defense or gratitudes.

The answers confirmed us, a Waldo de los Ríos honest, sincere, courageous.