You gotta do it with class and integrity. If not, you're gonna drag yourself through the mud.
— 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 was signed to MGM. I was in Vegas for sixteen weeks at the Sands Hotel.
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.
The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.
I should have my own publishing companies.
I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!
I want to be a soul singer.
I don't need to make a fortune, I need to survive.
Sometimes its controversy, but we all have our choices that we make.
I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.
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 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.
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.
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'm still amazed people remembered and didn't give up on me.
Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.
My manager was Buddy Glee, who put me together with Mike Curb, and was basically the idea to bring some soul to the label and bring something different to the label besides the Hank Williams situation.
But we didn't have the financial structure, like the right attorneys, the right managers, the right accountants, and we were going against the grain of what black entertainers is supposed to do.
The secret was to just be cool, stay in God's graces, and work it out.
I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.
Apollo Records signed me for my gospel ability.
As you grow older, you learn to understand life a little better.
