Most blues don't have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.

I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

And then adds with a laugh, 'but in retrospect I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.'

In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that.

I'm a very, very stubborn man.