Top 50 Quotes by Charlie Haden

In L.A., I played with Joe Pass and Gabor Szabo. Mick Goodrick plays guitar in the Liberation Music Orchestra, and he's a real special player. Then I did a duet concert with Jim Hall at the 1990 Montreal Festival.

I wanted to do 'Oh Shenandoah' because that's the town I was born in - as a tribute to my mom and dad for giving me all this music. I don't really sing this as a singer, because I'm not a singer. But I wanted to do it for them.

One of the things my mom used to do - I don't know why she chose me, but she chose me out of her six children to take to the African-American church that was in the town that we lived in Springfield, Missouri. And we would go to the church, and we would sit in the back row, and we would listen to all of the spirituals in the hymns.

I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

My family influenced me very deeply because my dad came from a musical background, from the hillbilly music part of it, and all that music came over from Scotland and Ireland and England in to the Appalachian Mountains and Ozark Mountains, where I was raised.