Solomon Burke

“That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.”

“I'm still amazed people remembered and didn't give up on me.”

“The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.”

“The secret was to just be cool, stay in God's graces, and work it out.”

“I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.”

“We had some problems - my children were kidnapped during that time, and it just changed my whole way of thinking, from being in show business and everything else.”

“I don't need to make a fortune, I need to survive.”

“Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.”

“I was signed to MGM. I was in Vegas for sixteen weeks at the Sands Hotel.”

“I want to be a soul singer.”

“You gotta do it with class and integrity. If not, you're gonna drag yourself through the mud.”

“I should have my own publishing companies.”

“Sometimes its controversy, but we all have our choices that we make.”

“As you grow older, you learn to understand life a little better.”

“If we could buy these properties and then invest in the Black community, with our own McDonald's, with our own Kentucky Fried Chickens, it was gonna be a great move.”

“I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!”

“We were using the record as a tool to invest money into real estate all through the South, because we were living in an era where the South was changing.”

“I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.”

“We were grooving, at that point, in the same direction, but remember, Roy Hamilton and myself were going into a path and a direction that had no programming.”

“I didn't need to borrow money from the record company, because if I had my own publishing company, and I had my own writers, I'd have enough to get and do whatever I wanted to do.”