Early in my career I began receiving letters from a woman in the Midwest who claimed to be my mother.
Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.
Mother was a talkative person, and I was a lot like her.
There were very few black people in Montana but we never felt out of place.
Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.
No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.