“I don’t care what studio I’m in, I don’t care what producers is producing it and I don’t care what song it is because they taught me those things I feel so protected wherever I go as far as music.”

Most black singers like to slow the word down and, and go directly to your heart. They’re not interested in your ears, we just want to go directly to your heart.

If there’s anything about the business that I love and that I’m extremely happy about, is that my career started at that time and that I met some of the greatest entertainers at that time and some are still here.

I’m a songwriter. So I’m OK. But when I wrote “Stand By Me” as a song and to know that the song will probably be here for hundred and hundreds of years to come, it’s great, you know. And it was just simple lyrics.

Many times I’ve gone on tours with Paul Anka. He would have someone sitting behind him to keep people from even talking to him. You were almost in a little restricted area there.

When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is the only light we see. No, I won’t be afraid, no, I won’t be afraid, just as long as you stand, stand by me.

And, because there was an honesty about all that was going on. It connected with the people in the street.

There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that’s in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.

Those things don’t happen today. I feel sorry for the kids in the industry today. They have on sunglasses, eat caviar in jet planes, but they’ll never know the true feeling that we did.

I do like what Alicia Keys and John Legend are doing. With their music, you keep your clothes on.

It’s something that, songwriters just write songs. It’s like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It’s not, it’s not about how many of these painting I’ll sell it’s just how they feel at the moment. And that’s how I wrote “Stand By Me”.

I still think my whole career was accidental. I didn’t pursue it. I feel like I’m cheating sometimes.

It never dawned on me at any particular time of my life that people are paid tremendous money to sing.

The Phil Spector that I would meet has always been a nice, quiet, little guy who’s very serious about his work; obviously you can tell that because each and everything he’s ever done has always been charted.

It doesn’t take me long to write songs.

When I got involved with The Five Crowns who later became The Drifters, and we got this hit record, I still was looking at this as kind of a fun thing.

You take a chance to do something and you realize in your heart it’s either going to be the greatest thing that ever happened or the worst thing that ever happened. It won’t be an in between, I almost made a hit. It will be an instant flop or an instant success.

Life has not taught me to expect nothing, but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors.

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.

She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God.

The music business doesn’t take up that much of my time.

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.

That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.