I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

Country music has the great stories.

It's not about battling the original artists when I record these songs, it's about paying tribute to them.

See, I don't like places where people can't dance - don't like clubs or theatres where a bunch of bourgeois people sit around tip, tip, tipping their fingers.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out.

And as I started reaching deeper I realized that most of the blues of that day was done by men. Women just didn't have the nerve.