“Music is an important part of our culture and record stores play a vital part in keeping the power of music alive.”

Rock ‘n’ roll accepted me and paid me, even though I loved the big bands I went that way because I wanted a home of my own. I had a family. I had to raise them. Let’s don’t leave out the economics. No way.

Maybellene, why can’t you be true?

The Big Band Era is my era. People say, ‘Where did you get your style from?’ I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That’s the best way I could explain it.

Looking hard for a drive in, searching for a corner cafe, where the hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.

All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn’t paint.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

Everything I wrote about wasn’t about me, but about the people listening.

I think I see her, please let me off this bus. Nadine, honey, is that you?

Up come a flat top, he was movin’ up with me.

It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues…It’s called rock now.

He could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.

Sometime we’ll try and reach for things we know we each want and don’t deserve.

Music is music and I think music people are the delivers, the actors, when they put their music out they want to insert their character in it. So they call it such and such so you know how they live so to speak.

All were artists, playing foolish, having fights and making love as if the rest of the world had no racial problems whatsoever.

Don’t bother me, leave me alone. Anyway, I’m almost grown.

I was totally alive when I wrote this because by coincidence someone just said your name.

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I’m home.

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

And perhaps the greatest paradox of all is how we stand here, fully wounded yet never more alive.

The things that made me feel dead, made me feel alive again.

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.