I did admire the comments and the music of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. And that didn't fly too well in the Deep South. It was not quite redneck enough.

I notice guys playing the piano playing a part up here and a part down there, and I wandered why couldn't I do that on the guitar?

If I was an actor, it would be like a part that was me. It has to be real to me. I have to make it mine. I really enjoy taking a song I feel that way about, and sometimes it can take a long time to come up with just the right touch. I think that's really my greatest talent, interpreting.

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

I didn't have the self-promotion instinct, and I just didn't care about it. I sort of had a "beat" attitude.

51 Martin [guitar] sounded pretty good as new guitar. Martin has several levels of guitars now, and this one is pretty good.

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.