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I used to be a great blues singer.

I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.

I was into playing American music, especially the blues.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.

I've always wanted to sing country music.

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.

I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.

I have always been infatuated with country music.

I sang in church growing up. Memphis is the blues capital of the world, we like to say.