I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.

The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.

Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

I never sang for a Grammy, for money, for fame. That's my whole purpose for singing: for people, for the fans.

I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.

I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.