Quotes on Singing

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

Singing brings out in me what I can't normally bring out in everyday life. It's an incredible feeling to be able to bare your soul to people you've never met in a way that can make them understand so clearly what you mean. That's what I love most about singing ... it becomes my truest form of communication.

I'm leaving my sorrows and all my memories behind to see what I find, somewhere in the shade near the sound of a sweet singing river, somewhere in the sun where the mountains make love to the sky.

The things that affect you most deeply - the things that will destroy you if you don't sing about them - are the things that you often end up singing about. It's really just about saying those things that everybody thinks but no one will say and making a connection by uncovering these diamonds that are inside of all of us that no one wants to tell each other about.

I've learned a lot of things about myself through singing. I used to have a certain dislike of the audience, not as individual people, but as a giant body who was judging me. Of course, it wasn`t really them judging me. It was me judging me. Once I got past that fear, it freed me up, not just when I was performing but in other parts of my life.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.

My songs are personal music, they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

From my spirit's gray defeat, From my pulse's flagging beat, From my hopes that turned to sand Sifting through my close-clenched hand, From my own fault's slavery, If I can sing, I still am free. For with my singing I can make A refuge for my spirit's sake, A house of shining words, to be My fragile immortality.

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Birds sing after a storm. Why shouldn't we?

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.

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.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

I remember the first show I had there were about 3 people, at least there was somebody. The next one was about 30. Then a couple years later there were 300 people and before I knew it there were 3,000... Then one day, I opened my eyes and there were 300,000 singing all my lyrics.

The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.