This was a time in my life [around eleven or twelve years old] when my musical horizons were expanding. Course I already knew church music. I had been singing it all my life. On records I heard gospel singers like Wings Over Jordan and the Golden Gate Quartet. In school I sang in the choir--they even gave me a little uniform--and some of us kids put together our own informal singing group, doing the same kind of rhythmic gospel music… You also have to understand that the South was full of country-and-western sounds--hillbilly music, we called it --and I can't recall a single Saturday night in those years when I didn't listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. I loved Grandpa Jones and those other characters. I could hear what they were doing and appreciate the feeling behind it. Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, Hank Williams, and later Eddie Arnold--these were singers I listened to all the time. I wasn't fanatical about their music, but I certainly dug it and paid it some mind. At the same time I didn't lose interest in the big white bands--Dorsey and Miller and Goodman and Krupa and Shaw. And naturally I knew the black bands--Jay Mc-Shann and Jimmie Lunceford, Lucky Millinder, Buddy Johnson, Basie, Ellington, and later Billy Eckstine, whose version of "Blowing the Blues Away" is something I still play. Al Hibbler singing with Duke, Ella singing with Chick Webb or the Ink Spots--this was music which hit me hard. I also knew all the white singers of the time: Bing Crosby, Dick Haymes, Vaughn Monroe, Tony Martin. Of the whites, only one--Jo Stafford--impressed me much. She had a silky quality to her voice which I liked; there was something haunting about her style. I listened to the Hit Parade on the radio in those years and heard the early sides of Frank Sinatra, though I don't think he really started wailing till later in his career; he's one of those people who has improved and mellowed with age. << less