It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

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

People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.

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.

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

What happens is, when I perform, I'm somewhere else. I go back in time and get in touch with who I really am. I forget my troubles, my worries.