Solomon Burke Quotations

The secret was to just be cool, stay in God's graces, and work it out.

I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.

You gotta do it with class and integrity. If not, you're gonna drag yourself through the mud.

As you grow older, you learn to understand life a little better.

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.

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 walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!

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.

Sometimes its controversy, but we all have our choices that we make.

I was signed to MGM. I was in Vegas for sixteen weeks at the Sands Hotel.

That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.

Apollo Records signed me for my gospel ability.

I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.

I don't need to make a fortune, I need to survive.

Im still amazed people remembered and didnt give up on me.

Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.

The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.

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.

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.

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.

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 started the publicity, we started moving in the same direction with them, and then the devil came in and just turned that right around.

He knows what He's doing, and sometimes we project what we can't see, but only God knows what's going to happen, and He knows the best. For all of us.

We've lost a giant, we've lost a legend, we've lost a man who created his own charisma and made it work around the world. It's just hard for me to really grasp that Wilson is already travelling towards the greater place.

Don't you see the resentment that he's carrying, the pain that he's carrying? He gets into these problems and situations. It hurts me so bad when he has these problems, because I know there's an inner hurt there.

I learned a great deal from Atlantic. Atlantic taught me how to walk in this life of music, it taught me how to fall and how to get myself back up.

The difference is I get a chance to say hello instead of goodbye, ... I get a chance to say it's so good to know we're still here with an opportunity to make it better, somehow, some way, for somebody besides ourselves. And how important it is to realize that we're not alone.

Girls were coming from every angle. I couldn't love them all. But I tried.

One of us is chained, none of us is free.

I want to be a soul singer.