Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

I prefer black music in general.

Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical base.

You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

This record has a lot of influences that I'd love to cover, like Marvin Gaye and Earth, Wind and Fire. Maybe I'll do some covers of my major influences during my live show.

Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.

As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices.

I really like R&B more than rap.

I'm making black music. That's the only outline for me, really. That's the only boundary to stay with. It's soul music. I'm going all out in those terms.

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.

One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.

Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play 'Portrait of Tracy.' It's one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.

Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in both soul and R&B traditions had crossed over.

My first gig was in Philadelphia and I played the drums for my older brothers. That same night, I also played drums for Martha and the Vandellas. Ah, the fond memories of being 14.

The Bee Gees were always heavily influenced by black music. As a songwriter, it's never been difficult to pick up on the changing styles of music out there, and soul has always been my favourite genre.

A lot of my success comes from black music. It's something I'm very proud of.

I went to college in Iowa for a little bit and tried to get some bands together there. That was about a year of my life.

You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

I'm an old soul. I like the Nat King Cole; Sam Cooke is my favorite singer of all time. But I'm into neo-soul; I'm into R&B. Some of the modern stuff appeals to me, but most of it comes from an older time.

There were a lot of R&B groups that were my heroes, but the funny thing about my career and the way it went and where it went, at first I didn't really want to do pop music. I was a little bit more into jazz and R&B.

I think there's always been progressive R&B music.

I grew up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and my mom and pop had an extensive record collection, so Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and all of those sounds and souls of Motown filled the house.

I enjoyed every minute of what I was doing with sessions, because The Blossoms, the group that I was singing with, they were the first black background singers. There weren't any.