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When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don't really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it.

The many sounds of Memphis shaped my early musical career and continue to be an inspiration to this day.

A lot of my music is very roots-oriented, and that's country and soul. I've been in every roadhouse in the South, soaking in all of that... Nashville is like a second home to me, and I'm just gravitating toward the songs.

I started singing on the radio in Los Angeles. I sang blues, but I would tend toward country blues.

I'd been to Memphis before, but we stayed out of Memphis early on in the late 70s for obvious reasons. People were very sensitive about Elvis Presley, and my stage name obviously would be provocative to some people in that area at that time.

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.

Ooooh, I love Nashville! It seems like everywhere you walk, there's great music coming out of every wall.

Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town.

Many cities make music, but no city breathes music quite like Memphis. The songs and sounds that come from here are uniquely American.

That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.