Lionel Richie Country Quotations

My earliest memories of country music are the Grand Ole Opry.

I am a country boy and proud of it.

I want to let everybody know that I'm from there, and country is Tuskegee. Or should I say rather, my country is Tuskegee. I was born and raised there, it's not just someplace I passed through one day.

It's quite interesting that in my growing up I had several influences. We had gospel music on campus. R&B music was, of course, the community, and radio was country music. So I can kind of see where all the influences came from.

Country is bringing in a little rock element... a little '80s element. Melody is king now. But its just in the music, its not so much in the songwriting, which is still very basic to the storytelling aspect of it.

I knew I was going to do a country album one day. But I was just trying to figure out for the life of me, what we were going to do to make it different, unique.

When I was growing up, music was music and there were no genres. We didn't look at it as country music. Popular music in Tuskegee was country music. So I didn't know it in categories. It was the radio.

Country music has always been about as close to R&B as you can possibly get. We're storytellers.

Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.

By growing up in Alabama, I had a melting pot of the whole pie: R&B, gospel, country.

Country music has always been about as close to R&B as you can possibly get. We're storytellers.