I had admired Waylon [ Jennings], but I never expected to meet him and get to know him. When I finally moved to Nashville years later, one night I went to a Harlan Howard Guitar Pull thing, and there was Waylon. He started talking about how much he loved my work and how great I was, and I couldn't even get a word in.

When you're an elite athlete, it's a very special moment in time and you don't want it to end.

If I wasn't so lazy, or if I had a roadie, I'd have a line of guitars on stage. I'd have a lap steel and a nylon string up there, but who wants to keep up with all that?

I saw all that [white trash] growing up in Alabama and Georgia. I had a group of country cousins and we'd go visit them when I was a kid. They lived on a red dirt Georgia back road, in a shack, with twelve kids. Farmers. No electricity, they had a well on their back porch, but they had nothing, yet they were the happiest, freest people I'd ever met. I loved to visit them. Great sense of humor, and they kept up with all the latest music, country, rockabilly, that stuff. Great food they grew in the fields and canned. Happy people.

The principle is competing against yourself.

I had admired Waylon [ Jennings], but I never expected to meet him and get to know him. When I finally moved to Nashville years later, one night I went to a Harlan Howard Guitar Pull thing, and there was Waylon. He started talking about how much he loved my work and how great I was, and I couldn't even get a word in.

I always had a hard time with Nashville. I reluctantly live there. I've mellowed, and it's improved some, in the fact it has more immigrants. There's some real Mexicans there, some folks from India, some of this and that. I'm not satisfied at all with living there. It's a dilemma for me.