The men and women of our armed forces played an instrumental role in the election process - securing polling sites and providing security - that allowed so many Iraqis the opportunity to vote freely for the first time ever.
Well, I guess that early 12 string. The first Martin I bought. I bought it around 1957 with money I earned as a janitor assistant. I bought brand new. I still have that.
If you're suddenly doing something you don't want to do for four years, just so you've got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don't have that 16-year-old drive any more and you'll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place.
A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.
We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.
You know not having my real dad around and having a step dad made me want to be a great dad. So now I have been one for 9 years. And now 3 daughters. So, that is what I am - a dad, first and foremost, before anything else. It's just something that comes natural now.
From then on in, me and Sonny started makin' records. My first records, Sonny was backin' me up. Sonny wasn't singin' natural at the time; he was singin' falsetto.
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
