Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them.
My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.
I was brought up with beautiful music - Nat King Cole and Glen Miller from my dad, and my mum loved Judy Garland and Doris Day - brilliant stuff. Through my brothers and sisters I heard David Bowie and The Specials, The Carpenters, Meatloaf and The Rolling Stones.
Usually, you'll have a show like the 'King of Queens,' and there'll be one really fat guy, but at least he has a beautiful wife - they balance it out.
Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality.
In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington but what he said and did after the march. In the years following the march, he did not play politics to see what crumbs a fundamentally corrupt system might toss to the beggars for justice.
Whether you're president or speaker, if you're wrong, we need to stand up and point it out. That's what Martin Luther King had talked about: being judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. So some of us pounded away on some of the ridiculous policies of Pelosi - and lo and behold, over time, the public began to see.
World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader or that king or prince or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.
I am very, very hopeful about the American South - I believe that we will lead America to what Dr. King called 'the beloved community.'
I am trying to build the biggest callus possible on my first finger so I can do one-finger bends and vibrato like B.B. King.
I've always been the king of silence. I've always been a minimalist comedian. I've taken my influence from Jack Benny, who was the king of that... I've always done 'less is more.'
Summer in Seattle allows me to indulge in some of the region's top culinary delights - I'm talking about wild king salmon and fresh, ripe Washington stone fruits and berries like cherries, peaches, plums, and blueberries.
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
I will, proudly and by preference, do at least one picture a year for King Brothers, and I will try to make it the best picture that I have it in me to do.
We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope.
As for our great King, when we venture into His presence, let us have a purpose there. Let us beware of playing at praying; it is insolence toward God.
The idea that content is king has long rested on the notion that distribution - in whatever form it takes - is a low-margin commodity, and the biggest share of profits flows to the creators of original programming, who can sell to the highest bidder.
My mother was a big influence. She kept pushing me because I was very shy and inhibited. And schoolwork was very difficult for me because I couldn't concentrate. I was failing almost every subject. To this day, I'm not too good at reading a book. But I was the president of my high school comedy group, and they treated me like a king.
Biggie was the King Of New York as a rapper. There's a lot more dangerous guys than Biggie Smalls out there, you know what I'm saying? John Gotti was way closer to King Of New York than him.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
