Quotes About Upbringing

My dad is a singer. He used to sing in nightclubs, or pizza joints.

I didn't grow up with classical music. My father was a folk music singer.

My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.

My mother was an opera singer and my father is a clarinet player, composer and conductor.

My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.

I'm like two different people. The way I sing comes from the music I listened to when I was younger, from black American R&B singers. My speaking voice is something else. It's what my mum and dad taught me.

I was brought up in a house with a lot of appreciation for music, all kinds of music, including jazz. But I never knew that it could really be a career. I didn't know any jazz singers. I never saw live jazz. I only heard these records.

My parents were both opera singers, and they also were both heavily into religious and church music.

You know, the funny thing was that I grew up listening to, like Whitney Houston and Cece Winans, and a lot of American singers.

I grew up singing Ray Charles and Jimmy Reed.

My father was very interested in music, and when he and his brothers were young, they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn't much art around.

I grew up in the church. My mother was highly religious. I was singing at the age of five for big congregations.

My father started me singing in church.

I came from a very musical family, so I grew up singing karaoke with the family. My family said 'do this' and brought me to singing lessons. I had always been writing poems and songs.

I was born and raised in East Los Angeles by a single mom who had three biological kids and adopted four more. I never met my dad.

I was raised by a single mom. I spent most of my time in daycare.

I was born to a single mom and raised by her and my grandparents.

I just grew up a poor black kid in Alabama with a single mom and two brothers.

I'm an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.

I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.

My grandmother - my inspiration - was a single mom with nine kids, and she helped raise me.

I was a kid growing up in Houston, didn't have a lot - three younger brothers, a single mom. It was tough.

I'm one of three boys raised by a single mom in a military beach town in the South.

I grew up with a single mother, and I wasn't out shooting too many guns.