My dad knew I was mad about music. While he worked as a barber he would hear songs on the radio and we'd have endless discussions about them. So I got my first record player when I was 11 years old.

I was a veteran, before I was a teenager.

When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I'm singing now is what makes the money.

Gospel music was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

Playback singing is fun and good money. But it's no big art really; only the film and record people glorify it with all those gold and silver discs given to singers. I wish I could take all of them to the goldsmith and draw the metal out.