I been trying to clean up my act with my children for a long time. And I pretty much got them all talking to me now. And they accept me as a humanoid again.

I think that any of the places that's cut off from money, things come up, what the people have to rely on.

Everybody in my neighborhood in the '40s, they played pianos. That's how people partied. They didn't try the TV, the radio was OK, records was cool, but when people wanted to party, they got around a piano. My mother played piano, my sister played. I've been around a lot of piano all my life.

In 1972, I recorded Gumbo, an album that was both a tribute to and my interpretation of the music I had grown up with in New Orleans in the 1940s and 1950s. I tried to keep a lot of the little changes that were characteristic of New Orleans, while working my own funknology on piano and guitar.

I started out with the guitar and was a studio musician back in the 50s, and then got shot in my finger.

I always seemed to be in the right place at the wrong time.

I been trying to clean up my act with my children for a long time. And I pretty much got them all talking to me now. And they accept me as a humanoid again.