I'm a folk preacher. A folk therapist. A folk musician. I come from authentically that which is of my experience. Therefore, the music is strictly from the soul, strictly improvisational.

I don't go and study other folks. I come from where I came from, as a kid, in the little black church I grew up in. And some of the things they did I rejected, because I could see that it was a manipulation and an exaggeration. My struggle is never to fool folks; to keep it authentic - who we are and who we are becoming - rather than to mimic or to translate what others do into my own terms.

Death is a reality, but life is a reality also. You got to live at this time in your life like you've never lived before. And therefore you've got to find those values in your life that fulfill what you need to do. Now, what is it you need to do?

I need to be in touch with the people. You've got to look in their eyes, and you've got to feel what they feel. You've got to engage people. All that we do and believe in is engaging people to touch, to heal, to look at each other's eyes, to feel with each other, to cry with each other, to moan, to groan, to rejoice, to be happy.

The music certainly plays a major role. You can be free enough to comfort each other, to touch each other, to embrace each other, to engage each other, to not be afraid of each other. The music certainly has that very strong element. Go back to folk songs, gospel, jazz, and spirituals. See, all of that came out of tremendous pain and hurt, rejection, loss, alienation, and abandonment. What I'm doing is I'm expressing my pain and hope at the same time.

I was the fifth child in a family of six, five boys and one girl. Bless that poor girl. We were very poor; it was the 30s. We survived off of the food and the little work that my father could get working on the roads or whatever the WPA provided. We were always in line to get food. The survival of our family really depended on the survival of the other black families in that community. We had that village aspect about us, that African sense about us. We always shared what we had with each other. We were able to make it because there was really a total family, a village.

When people get up on the stage and say, "I've got AIDS," or "I'm in recovery," gosh, it's hard for them. It's like that story touches every person's story. You know, they open their entire humanity up. Storytelling is very important in life. Telling the truth is critical. It's like, again, the melody. The melody of jazz music is the truth, for me.