When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God and I always believed it. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon.

I'm thankful for the sea breeze that feels so good right now, and the scent of jasmine when the sun starts going down.

I kept talking to my producers at Columbia about recording one of those [prison] shows. So we went into Folsom on February 11, 1968, and recorded a show live.

My father was a cotton farmer first and - but he didn't have any land or what land he had, he lost it in the Depression. So he worked as a woodman and cut pulpwood for the paper mills, rode the rails in boxcars going from one harvest to another to try to make a little money picking fruit or vegetables.

I would take songs that I'd loved as a child and redo them in my mind for the new voice I had, the low voice.

There's a man going 'round taking names / And he decides who to free and who to blame / Everybody won't be treated all the same / There'll be a golden ladder reaching down / When the Man comes around.