Me and my partner, Conway Twitty, cleaned up at the 1972 Country Music Association Awards.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Conway Twitty was always our local hero while I was growing up. He had a series of good bands. I wanted to sit in, if Conway would let me. And he did a couple of times.
One of my all-time favorite country singers is a guy named Conway Twitty.
My lifelong friend and mentor Frank Barsalona is gone. And the music business as we knew it went with him.
Being on 'Nashville' and working with some incredible people like T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller - so many wonderful, incredible musicians that I've been blessed to play with and observe - that has continued to shape the process of arranging music, writing music.
I was signed to RCA to be a country singer.
I couldn't live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, 'cause I had been to art college.
I grew up with the Highwaymen, which was Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. Mom and Dad rode rodeo, so country music was always in the house and the car. They threw in some Dolly Parton, too.
I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.
I joined Tommy Dorsey at the Paramount Theater in New York as a singer. I replaced Frank Sinatra.
T Bone and I grew up together in Fort Worth, Texas. He had his own recording studio by the time he was seventeen years old. When we were both nineteen he made the first archival recording of my voice.