Quote collection
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"That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out."
"I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be."
"When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life."
"Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don't know what I'm sorry about. I don't."
"When I look out at the people and they look at me and they're smiling, then I know that I'm loved. That is the time when I have no worries, no problems."
"I sing the songs that people need to hear."
"People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks."
"I am so happy that I am alive and can walk."
"My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!"
"When I'm performing for the people, I am me, then. I am that little girl who, when she was five years old, used to sing at church. Or I'm that 15-year-old young lady who wanted to be grown and wanted to sing and couldn't wait to be smokin' a cigarette, you know?"
"I really turned into, you know, the real street kid. I was kind of like a runaway, but I had a mother, you know what I mean, and I had a place to stay."
"My mother always wanted me to be glamorous. When I thought about that, it really fired me up, and once I lost all those pounds, I started to feel really good about myself."
"It's not about battling the original artists when I record these songs, it's about paying tribute to them."
"I talked to the record company about what I had in mind. They said they wanted something lush. I figured the best thing to do was let them hear what I had in mind."
"My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy."
"Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool."
"In some ways, it's my rage that keeps me going."
"And as I started reaching deeper I realized that most of the blues of that day was done by men. Women just didn't have the nerve."
"You know, YOUR President, the one with the big ears-he ain't my President - had that woman singing for him at his Inauguration. She's going to get her [expletive] whooped. How dare Beyonce sing MY song that I been singing forever. Now I'm going to sing it for y'all."
"It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation."