When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.

Funk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

Since I was three I've been playing the piano. I've been onstage.

The worst thing about that kind of prejudice... is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.

There are all kinds of things that can be done. You can change rhythms, you can change chords, you can change whole concepts. But it will only work, on a record or in a performance, if you can make the people buy it.

Since I was three I've been playing the piano. I've been onstage. My mother is an Evangelist and I used to play the piano at her revival meetings.