So I asked him to play "Trav'lin' All Alone." That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. . . . When I showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.

And when you're poor, you grow up fast.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

If I don't have friends, then I ain't nothing.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.