I'm happy whenever anybody does my material. I don't care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people's songs.

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

If it's worth remembering, I'll remember it. If something keeps coming back, if I keep thinking of that phrase, if I see manifestations of it at different times and different places, then I feel it's worth making a song out of.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

The thing of playin' and singin' never bothered me.

The idea was I'd never amount to anything in music, The theme there was that I was talented, but I wouldn't work hard enough to do anything with it.

There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.