Joe Cocker Quotes

When I was really little I would sit in the back of my dad's car when he'd be playing old-school music. He'd turn down the music and turn around and I'd be singing and know all of the words but I didn't even know how to talk. From then on I've always wanted to be a singer.

I would also like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

My dad taught me to play bass. He's a bass player; he still plays in a band in Michigan to this day. He taught me to play bass when I was about 6. I used to just go to band practice with him, and whoever didn't show up for rehearsal that day, I would take their spot.

The big thing in my family growing up is that everybody had to play a musical instrument. We were like the von Trapps.

I knew I wanted to sing when I was a very small boy. When I was probably 4 years old. My mother played a guitar and I would sit with her and she would sing and I learned to sing along with her.

As long as I can remember, growing up we had a guitar around our house, and I was always plucking on it.

There are early videos of me at three years old with a tiny guitar trying to sing 'Friends in Low Places' by Garth Brooks.

I would go to sleep with headphones on. My mom and pop - they would have music loud enough to shake the walls.

I started playing the piano when I was 6 years old 'cause my folks tried to get me away from the gramophone. And I just - I lived for music since I could think. And they got me piano lessons. So by the time I was 13, I was quite an accomplished piano player and musician.

Yeah, my dad bought me a guitar when I was like 10, and I didn't really want it then.

I knew the full 'Judy Garland Carnegie Hall' double album set at age 2. And then my mother wondered why I was gay. I was like, 'Are you nuts? You would make me get on the table to sing Judy Garland songs and you're upset?'

I played the piano as a boy for six years, from the time I was six to 12 years old. My piano lessons ended when my father died because our family had no more money. I used to have a mestiza teacher. She'd come once a week to teach me piano lessons, and she'd bribe me each time with an apple; otherwise, I wouldn't play.

My dad didn't want me to play guitar. He played piano, so I chose that. And I ended up loving it.

I grew up in a house that was always happy, and my family was always music, music. I started playing percussion very young, because I had some uncles who were musicians and all my aunts were singers.

My stepfather met my mother when I was seven years old, and he was a guitar player. So he caught me messing with his guitar, his electric guitar, and he tried to show me some chords, but my hands were too small.

Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, I'd like to study piano.

When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

At the age of nine, playing the violin at school, and then onto the mandolin.

Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.

We all like music in my family, but I'm the only one who's made it my life.

My dad was a musician who went to Berklee, and he made me learn piano when I was five.

My mother made me take piano lessons, and because I am her oldest and she had not yet been worn down by the task of prodding five children to practice every day, she kept me practicing despite my whining.

Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that's what began my interest in music.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

I've actually been playing music ever since I was a young a kid. I got my first guitar when I was about 7 or 8 years old, so I've always been doing music.