When I was four or five, my father had a general store in Winchester and I don't think the farmers could ever leave on Saturday afternoon until I had been placed up on the counter to sing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood.
I was reared on folk music.
My father was in the civil service. I can remember standing in a bus shelter in the pouring rain, and that we were allowed candy floss at the end of the holiday if we had behaved.
As a child, I lived in Germany at the Ramstein air force base, where my dad sang at a nightclub in Kaiserslautern. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so when I was, like, ten or 11, I would go with them to the bar until two in the morning.
I lived in town until I was eight and then I moved nearer the farmland, so I had a mixture.
It was a small farm in a little rural town by the Indiana state border. I lived there from ages 5 to 12, I would say, before we moved to Dallas. We had chickens and a vegetable garden, and I had to get up to milk the goats at seven in the morning or do it at seven at night.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.
My mother raised me in the church. I was not allowed to stay home on Sunday; there was no option. I sang in the choir all the way up until I went to college.
We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.
When I was about 3, my grandfather used to give me and my sister a nickel to sit out on the front porch with him and sing songs.