I was so glad to get out of the cotton patch and stop pickin' cotton, I wouldn't of cared who come by and said, 'I'll take you to Chicago.'
I'd have to pick cotton for a year to make what I'd make in a week in L.A.
Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
Cotton is my life.
I loved to get all dusty and ride horses and plant potatoes and cotton.
There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.
My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were 20 children, it wasn't too hard to pick that much cotton. But my father, year after year, didn't get too much money and I remember he just kept going.
Summer time an' the livin' is easy, Fish are jumpin' an' the cotton is high. Oh, yo' daddy's rich, and yo' ma' is good-lookin', So hush, little baby, don' yo' cry.
Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton.
Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.
The people among which I lived - and yet live, mainly - made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men.
I developed my style by pickin' a lot of cotton, plowin' that ole mule every day. I just got the rhythm, and any rhythm I need I know where it is; I know where to find it.
Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.
