 Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience. |
| I've tried to help a lot of young artists get started. |
| I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well. |
| I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange. |
| It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now. |
| A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble. |
| Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs. |
| Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing. |
| Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting. |
| Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did. |
| Fans will praise you, scold you, and offer helpful advice. Fans will also defend you. |
| The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls. |
| It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway. |
| Chet Atkins... is probably the best guitar player who ever lived. |
| When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out. |
| Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television. |
| I don't care what the religion is called; as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them. |
| A fan will grab you and hug you and will not let go. When that happens, you wish it could be that way all over the world. |
| The time I spent thinking about how I was better than somebody else or worrying about somebody else's attitude was time I could put to better use. |
| What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't. |
