It's pretty exciting. An honorary doctorate of the arts. It doesn't get any better.

I pretty much move around wherever I like.

What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.

I don't care if it's somebody else's song. Most of the time, you'll find that I'll put my own stamp on it. But I started writing more because, you know, it's easy to regurgitate what somebody else is doing, but it's exciting to be able to come up with your own writing.

I came up not understanding that a lot of people didn't start to hear music until they went to college or were turned on by an older brother or sister.

I've only been on MTV once as one of their 'Closet Classics,' with some bootleg footage of a 1970 tour I did in Holland. They didn't know what to make of my music, but they finally invented a name for it - world beat music.