If you're not doing something different, you're not doing anything.
If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.
I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it.
I'll never retire. I'm just using up somebody else's oxygen if I retire.
I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.
I was looking for what was coming from a man's soul and a man's conviction. I didn't care about his past. If it was innate and natural and felt good to him and it communicated.
I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.
There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.
Feeling has as much to say as the words do. You can have the greatest words in the world and if they're not believable, they don't strike a chord and they're not said convincingly, it's not a great song.
Teenagers did not have, before rock 'n' roll and rhythm-and-blues - they did not have any type of music they could call their own once they got over 4 or 5 years old until they were well into their 20's and considered adults.
