Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I'd go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I'd sing and play.

Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you gotta stand in the doorway.

I used to play - when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I know what my sweet spot has been. It's personal stuff, dysfunction, fear of intimacy, family stuff, psychology stuff. I eviscerate myself onstage.

I'm not a kid. You don't get in this business for anonymity. It's not like I have posters of myself on the wall, but at the same time, I'm kind of ready for a little bit of it, but I worry for my little one, and my family - their privacy. That's what I'm more protective of.

The biggest thing that I get most excited about is, my family and I would watch television together, and we weren't just passive viewers. Something would happen, and then we would talk about it. When Will Smith was shot on 'Fresh Prince,' that sparked a conversation about safety.

My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met.