Cynthia Robinson

I realized I was a girl playing with all of these great musicians, but race and gender never did cross my mind, really, until other people started talking about them. They weren't really an issue for me.

I told my kids, 'It doesn't matter if this person or that person in the family isn't perfect; this is what you've got. We have to work with that, and if you can't work with that, then you're just jumping into someone else's family, and there's always going to be something missing if you don't work that out.'

I used to hear all these guys on 78s at my mother's when I was a teenager... I used to daydream that I was onstage playing the solos; I'm playing with B.B. King, and I'm playing with Lowell Fulsom, Jimmy McCracklin. And I literally ended up being in a band that backed them up at different clubs.

To ask questions can become the laziest and wobbliest occupation of a mind, but when you must yourself answer the problem that you have posed, you will meditate your question with care and frame it with precision.