Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.
“My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.”
“We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.”