Lizz Wright Quotes

The idea of music coming from the Church is not new.

The most consistent musical experience I had growing up was church music.

I was a big fan of black gospel. As a kid, there were black groups I sang with from my teen years to my early 20s.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

I know at my church a lot of the times we sung from hymn books and as we got older we started to change with time. I can honestly say that I was never influenced to write for the church.

But nowadays hymns are the norm, because people don't have much else to sing.

I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and we would sing in the churches, and there's lots of good mountain church singers out there. Like a lot of folks who turn out to be secular music artists, that's a lot of the training you put in, whether you know it or not.

Whether looking at pop music, hip-hop or R&B, it's rare to find an artist who hasn't been touched or affected by the power and soul of gospel music. In fact, many of today's popular artists such as Whitney Houston, John Legend, and Katy Perry started their careers in the church choir.

All you hear Catholics turning out these days are pop versions of the old Protestant anthems.

I loved music since the Seth Ward Baptist Church outside of Plainview.

I'm from the gospel world. I grew up playing in church.

I grew up singing in the church choir, but I've not really had any training.

Music was brought up in the church.

We played, jazz, blues, dixie, and it all came from the church. When I went to church, I would see the sisters and brothers doing the same beat.

I had experiences or exposure to music in church. I went to a church, it was very unique. It was a predominantly African American Catholic church. So they would have - one mass would be traditional church music, and then the other mass would be gospel music.

The whole musical institution of the church involves a lot of different styles of communication at the same time. Things like call and response. Sometimes they use the music to pray and work things out. And there's so much repetition in gospel, it's like churning butter.

The first music that came to my ear was gospel... I used to sing 'Amazing Grace' with a very strong southern accent and a vibrato already at five years old.

So many great singers we know have come from the church.

I'd been trained in choral, gospel, and a little bit of opera.

We sang a lot of church music. We were very active Baptists. Supposedly, I started singing when I was being given a bath - at 14 months or something like that. My mother and dad both swore that was true, but I'm sure it wasn't very good... We always had the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons.

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

I come from the performance world, but the idea of a worship song is different. It's useful music.

I actually started singing in church when I was about five years old. I remember looking at the choirs and just hearing all of those great big beautiful voices. And there was this one woman who could just wail. And I remember trying to sing like her when I was like going home.

I was in a church choir early on and that really helped me musically in terms of chops, learning how to sing harmonies.