I got fame and fortune, and I lost my sense of reasoning.

I would wear flamboyant clothes and long hair, and most singers at the time didn't.

People called rock & roll 'African music.' They called it 'voodoo music.' They said that it would drive the kids insane. They said that it was just a flash in the pan - the same thing that they always used to say about hip-hop.

I look back on my life, comin' out of Macon, Georgia - I never thought I'd be a superstar, a living legend. I never heard of no rock and roll in my life.

Elvis may be the King of Rock and Roll, but I am the Queen.

Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.