American music is a powerful ingredient in international music, and as much as it comes from within, it also comes from without.
Particularly with the blues, it's not just about bad times. It's about the healing spirit.
The song of the blues, the song of the music, was something a lot of people missed out on. They thought they had to swagger a certain way or bark at the mic, and you don't have to do that.
I've only been on MTV once as one of their 'Closet Classics,' with some bootleg footage of a 1970 tour I did in Holland. They didn't know what to make of my music, but they finally invented a name for it - world beat music.
My mother was American, and my father was from the Caribbean, and there was a big open door into the world of humanity and music.
I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.
My grandparents on my father's side came to this country from the Caribbean with a strong connection to Africa and no shame about it.
As a youngster, my parents made me aware that all that was from the African Diaspora belonged to me. So I came in with Caribbean music, African music, Latin music, gospel music and blues.
I was always taught that Latin, Caribbean people were cousins to me, as well as blues was a cousin to me, as well as Africans were direct relatives to me. It was all a part of my language.
I'm old enough to chew my peas and corn without choking.
When I was 5 or 6, I was messing around with the piano, and I listened to everything from Chopin to boogie-woogie.
I didn't want to fall into the trap of complacency.
I'm always cracking up when I hear what people think I should be doing.
I don't need the credits for playing the blues and paying the dues. I've already done it. There are some other things to do here - movies and scores and voice-overs.
It's pretty exciting. An honorary doctorate of the arts. It doesn't get any better.
It's very interesting, the dynamics of popularity. When you do something all the time, you don't worry about whether it's trendy or not.
What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.
In looking out into the world, it didn't look all that nice out there. And who were the nice people? Certainly Mahatma Gandhi was.
I came up not understanding that a lot of people didn't start to hear music until they went to college or were turned on by an older brother or sister.
No matter what went down, music was always going to be a part of my life. What ultimately happened is that, over a period of time, I just kind of looked around and when like, 'Wow! I'm actually making a living doing this.'
