Growing up, I was always around adult musicians who played for their entire lives. So that's what I wanted to do, and I always had that in mind.

Growing up in Dallas, my first influences on the guitar were T-Bone Walker and Les Paul. T-Bone taught me how to play lead guitar behind my head and do the splits in 1951 when I was nine.

I think the audiences abroad are older and come from a more mature society. They have a different understanding of whats happening as art.

You have to know what your value is. I started learning my value when I was 12 years old.

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

After my primary school education, I started gathering little children by visiting parents to ask if they wanted somebody to care for their kids by teaching them the Bible. I have never attended any seminary school or Bible college in my life.

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept.