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

We all, if we go with ego I go or you go ego thing, it's got to be free from all of that and just roll, because music is a spiritual thing. It's got to come through us and can't just hit us. It's got to be part of us that comes through us and goes to the people, and then they come back to us and give us more spirit.

When the voice and the vision on the inside is more profound, and more clear and loud than all opinions on the outside, you've begun to master your life.

I'd rather have the whole world against me than my own soul.

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.

History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell there political and cultural time of day. It is also a compass that people use to find themselves on the map of human geography. History tells a people where they have been and what they have been, where they are and what they are. Most important, history tells a people where they still must go, what they still must be. The relationship of history to the people is the same as the relationship of a mother to her child.

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.