Roger Miller opened a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities of country music, and it's making more impact now because it's earthy material: stories and things that happen to everyday people. I call it 'people music.'

Music is music. It doesn't matter if I am trying to aim at country or trying to aim at pop.

I know it was raw in some places, and I was a jerk in some places, but that's the way I was, and I was stupid.

You don't play around with a good song. You try to just say it right in the proper place, and if you get the music and voice in tune, you'll be all right. That's always worked for me.

Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.

My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.

If success attends my steps, honor and glory await my name-if defeat, still shall it be said we died like brave men, and conferred honor, even in death, on the American Name.

The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era's more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too.