I Try To Improvise Like

God Bless The Child That's Got His Own.

People Don't Understand The Kind Of Fight It Takes To Record What You Want To Record The Way You Want To Record It.

So I Asked Him To Play "trav'lin' All Alone." That Came Closer Than Anything To The Way I Felt. And Some Part Of It Must Have Come Across. The Whole Joint Quieted Down. If Someone Had Dropped A Pin, It Would Have Sounded Like A Bomb. When I Finished, Everybody In The Joint Was Crying In Their Beer, And I Picked Thirty-eight Bucks Up Off The Floor. . . . When I Showed Mom The Money For The Rent And Told Her I Had A Regular Job Singing For Eighteen Dollars A Week, She Could Hardly Believe It.

Sometimes It's Worse To Win A Fight Than To Lose.

I Joined Count Basie's Band To Make A Little Money And To See The World. For Two Years I Didn't See Anything But The Inside Of A Blue Goose Bus, And I Never Got To Send Home A Quarter.