A Quote by Mavis Staples

I feel so good singing songs that I sang with my father. — © Mavis Staples
I feel so good singing songs that I sang with my father.
I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things.
She sang a lot of songs. 'The Bear Went Over the Mountain' and things like that. But the one she was really good at singing was 'I Found a Peanut.' Now I know why she sang that so many times.
When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
When I went to Japan I sang in Japanese; when I went to Greece I sang in Greek. When I went to Spain, I sang in Spanish. I couldn't speak it very well, but I sang, I was beautiful in singing it. These things just constantly attracted people to the uniqueness of who I was and the way in which I performed.
My father was a singer. So it just kind of happened that one Sunday while my dad was singing, I just walked out and stood next to him, and I started singing the song that he was leading, and I sang it in perfect pitch.
He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.
I didn't even know the industry of songwriting existed. I thought everybody sang songs and they were only singing the songs that they wrote. So after I found out about songwriting in college, I was like, "Okay, I want to do that."
I always sang when I was little-bitty girl. I sang all the time. And then I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee, so I sang in a show at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. You know, they have all those variety shows where Dollywood is. And I sang there and yodeled and clogged, but I never wrote my own songs.
I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.
I have been singing since childhood and, over the years, sang songs from different languages from India and across the globe.
Many times, people have come up to me after singing some songs, and they'd say, 'Richie, do you know what you did?' And I'd say, 'What?' And they'd go, 'I wrote these songs down for you to sing, and you sang them all in a row.' But that's the kind of communication that happens, you know.
My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.
My mind was so geared towards being a performing artist, singing all these classical pieces, but the sense of loneliness I got when I moved from New York to El Paso meant that writing turned into singing. I'd sing all these songs, and they'd make me feel better. Songs that crafted the way my life was going to go.
I sang in 'Waiting for Guffman,' and I sang in 'A Mighty Wind.' I can carry a tune, but I don't like that Broadway singing.
You could say singing is in our genes. Both our parents sang and made up songs constantly.
My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it. I felt a calling.
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