The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.

God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.