It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing.

When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always opened... We weren't something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

and half of learning to play is learning what not to play
and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say
and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves
and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove

she crawls out on a limb and begins to build her home
and it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not alone

up up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple
but god's work isn't done by god
it's done by people

As she spoke, her voice never wavered; it was the voice of someone who has forced a larger meaning out of tragedy.

Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.

From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.

She talks with a broken heart - Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it's almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn't even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess...

I am this thing that needs to sing.

✓My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.
✓What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man
✓What is a soul? It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room

✓There are many spokes on the wheel of life. First, we're here to explore new possibilities.
✓I did it to myself. It wasn't society... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.
✓What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.
✓There's nothing written in the Bible, Old or New testament, that says, 'If you believe in Me, you ain't going to have no troubles.'

✓Music to me is like breathing. I don't get tired of breathing, I don't get tired of music.
✓Just because you can't see anything , doesn't mean you should shut your eyes.
✓Don't go backwards - you've already been there.
✓Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together. You got some sugar and I don't; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well, I'll give you some of mine.
✓Sometimes my dreams are so deep that I dream that I'm dreaming.

✓I don't think any of us really knows why we're here. But I think we're supposed to believe we're here for a purpose.
✓I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually saying a word about it.
✓.There's nothing written in the Bible, Old or New testament, that says, 'If you believe in Me, you ain't going to have no troubles.'
✓Other arms reach out to me, Other eyes smile tenderly, Still in peaceful dreams I see, The road leads back to you.
✓I can't help what I sound like. What I sound like is

...whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.

These are some good questions to ask till one decides on the song, one’s true song: What has happened to my soul-voice? What are the buried bones of my life? In what condition is my relationship to the instinctual Self? When was the last time I ran free? How do I make life come alive again? Where has La Loba gone to? The old woman sings over the bones, and as she sings, the bones flesh out. We too “become” as we pour soul over the bones we have found. As we pour our yearning and our heartbreaks over the bones of what we used to be when we were young, of what we used to know in the centuries past, and over the quickening we sense in the future, we stand on all fours, four-square. As we pour soul, we are revivified. We are no longer a thin solution, a dissolving frail thing. No, we are in the “becoming” stage of transformation.

Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.

True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.