I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

In this country kings or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.

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.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

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

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.