I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
Georgia Tech beat us and Mississippi Southern tied us last year, and Texas beat us after we had the game won. We only played about five games the way we were capable of playing and lost one of those.
If you talk to the Whites in Mississippi they will tell you, 'You can go to any school you want to; we don't see race.' Biggest lie ever told.
The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
My grandmother introduced me to B.B. King. She wasn't someone who had a lot of posters, but there was a big poster of B.B. King on the wall as soon as you walked into her house in Meridian, Mississippi.
There's no real network, and every city in Mississippi is so spread out, so it isn't easy to drive around and pass out CDs. So when an artist from Natchez or Gold Coast or Meridian breaks out, they already know exactly what kind of artist they want to be. The grind and the hustle is just so adamant.
I grew up watching my dad scout games live. They played on Saturday. Sometimes they wouldn't get the films until Monday. Sunday air shipping from wherever the college team was located - Starkville, Mississippi, or wherever the film was coming from. It took two days.
Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century.
I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.
