They always said, "You can sing your way out of the ghetto."
The Guardian, Interview, The Guardian, 30 November 2012 source ↗
The question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 255 →Sounds cliched, but I always wanted to be an actor.
Zoe Ball
British TV and radio personality
I only ever wanted to be Barbra Streisand. I probably still do.
Edward Enninful
Ghanaian-born English editor and stylist
In African families, you can be one of three things: a doctor, a lawyer or a failure. I wanted to be an Egyptologist, but things worked out in the end.
adrienne maree brown
Writer and facilitator; author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism
I'm about to be a superstar. I'm about to be a singer.
More from Bobby Womack
View profile →Cats.
I always say: "They throw me on stage and they throw me off!" I get so carried away, I carry on singing … once I played for two and a half hours. I always say to my guy, please let me know I gotta get off 15 minutes before, because I hate to rush. Give me a flashlight or something. Because I never want to get into a place where they say: "He wouldn't come off!"
I can sing my ass off, better than I could before.
I always say: "They throw me on stage and they throw me off!" I get so carried away, I carry on singing … once I played for two and a half hours. I always say to my guy, please let me know I gotta get off 15 minutes before, because I hate to rush. Give me a flashlight or something. Because I never want to get into a place where they say: "He wouldn't come off!"
I like to swim, I like to play with my dogs and I love to eat – but I have to start watching that because my suits are getting too small.
My worst habit was drugs, though I haven't done that in 20 years. Cocaine makes you smoke cigarettes and the two of them make you drink. If you are fortunate, you grow up; if you are not fortunate, you go out.
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