Eunice Kathleen Waymon Quotes
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Desegregation is a joke.
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You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
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Many times I feel different like a different person.
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I was reared in the church from the age of three. I've played piano since I was three. I performed at revivals and for my people around North Carolina for several years. People around town collected money to send me to school.
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As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.
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I can read and arrange, but I can't write.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.
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We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.
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I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.
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I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.
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I don't like to go to strange places. I was in Italy for about five hours on my way to Africa.
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I made wine from the lilac tree/Put my heart in its recipe/It makes me see what I want to see/And be what I want to be.
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By the time I was eight I was taking classical piano lessons and I wanted to be a concert pianist. But that didn't work out. I graduated from high school and my formal education ended.
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If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.
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Through music you can become sad, joyful, loving, you can learn. You can learn mathematics, touch, pacing... Oh my God! Ooh... Wow... You can see colors through music. Anything!
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Since I was three I've been playing the piano. I've been onstage.
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There are all kinds of things that can be done. You can change rhythms, you can change chords, you can change whole concepts. But it will only work, on a record or in a performance, if you can make the people buy it.
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I do not believe in mixing of the races. You can quote me. I don't believe in it, and I never have. I've never changed. I've never changed my hair. I've never changed my color, I have always been proud of myself, and my fans are proud of me for remaining the way I've always been. I married a white man one time, but he was a creep.
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Since I was three I've been playing the piano. I've been onstage. My mother is an Evangelist and I used to play the piano at her revival meetings.
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My people have very subtle slang, inflections and ways of saying things that has little to do with words. If you're from the same place, you'll feel the jargon and know exactly what's happening. Same with any neighborhood cat. What he sees and hears and feels and lives makes him what he is. That's what blues is.
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I applied for a scholarship to Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down. And it took me about six months to realize it was because I was black. I never really got over that jolt of racism at the time.
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I don't like to go to strange places.
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I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs... and good ones.