Growing up, there was a lot of pressure for women to be good-looking, but my mum was very strict, and she didn't allow me to wear make-up. Looking back, it was good for me. It slowed me down from becoming an adult too quickly.

I didn't really know many girls, growing up, because there weren't many other people living around where I lived.

Not everybody wanted a female to be the front face of a big band, you know... You had to be three times better than a man had to be.

I lived in buses. I didn't really have anything else. I didn't feel like a female, and I ended up really kind of isolated. Everybody thinks you're so happy and so wealthy and such a big star, but you're really kind of lonely and don't know how to stop it.

My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.

Growing up, my dad was a pastor, and much like The First Family or people in front of the public eye, we were highly scrutinized as a family within the church and looked at as - well, I guess you would call an example of what that family image should be.

I have a big family, and I spend a lot of time with them.

There's this idea that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder in an African family is a childless woman - and the lowest rung of all is a motherless child.