I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory. |
I got that first record out, it came out in '47... Then my name began to ring around. I began to take over. From that point, I tell you, Chicago was in my hand, all the more time that those guys had to listen to me. |
I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing. |
I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone. |
I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn. |
I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good-I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing. |
I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for? |
I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi. |
I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it. |
I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do. |
I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age. |
If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket. |
Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. |
Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street. |
Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there. |