A lotta years I was out there on the road pulling one-nighters. Then I got hired to sing in Sam Donahue’s band in 1963. I was 19 years old.
My first job with Walmart was unloading trucks in a warehouse. Then I worked as an assistant manager in a store, and I was lucky enough to get into our buyer-training program. I loved merchandising and had a career path that led me through Sam’s Club and Walmart International.
The tailor from ‘Avatar’ actually made my suit for ‘Uncharted 3.’ And no, it’s not a hand-me-down from Sam Worthington. My 11-year-old would fit in Sam Worthington’s. I’m 6′ 1″, 180 pounds.
I feel like regardless of whether or not I win this award or I win that award or I don’t win this award – I’m still Sam at the end of the day. And that’s what defines me.
Popular music has always been rooted in the blues, whether it’s Adele or Led Zeppelin or Sam Cooke. It’s just the beat that changes.
We’d play the American bases and found all these wonderful records by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke. Without American music, there would not have been a British Invasion.
Sam Cooke was a gospel singer like myself, and when he crossed over and started singing rock n’ roll, it kind of gave me the green light to go ahead and do it.
I played with Sam Lay, Jimmy Reed, Big Walter Horton, Big Moose Walker, and all those guys.
I gave a Christmas party last year – well, two Christmases ago – where I did a Sam Cooke show. I didn’t perform as R. Kelly. I performed the Sam Cooke show from 1964, when he performed at the Copacabana.
I remember those moments in my life when the tape came out on that Tuesday, and I went to Sam Goody to cop it. And sitting and listening to it. In awe of the music I was listening to, but also imagining this music at the hip-hop clubs and with the homies in the car.
A lot of times, that’s hard to capture: what you sound like in person versus what you sound like on record. If I had total control, I would do a lot of the old songs – not only my songs but Sam Cooke songs, Luther Vandross, melody songs. That’s what I would really do if I had an opportunity to do a record.
When I first played New York, it was with James Brown at the Apollo, and I was playing in a band under the name The Valentinos. I remember Sam Cooke saying, ‘I want you to go in there with James Brown. I couldn’t be as hard on you as James Brown would be.’ But we came out marching like soldiers.
None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn’t make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.
Our sixth child, MariaVictoria, when she was born, before any of us could hand MariaVictoria to my wife Rachel, Uncle Sam stepped in and handed her a bill for $43,000.
I know just one thing is those guys, KG and everyone, they’re hungry. They want it bad. Sam’s the only one that’s had that, has the ring. Other than him, everybody else over there, we want it bad.
I wasn’t a big Sam Darnold fan after they beat us in the Rose Bowl game my sophomore year, but that’s just a competitive thing. We joke around about that all the time. I got to know him a little more.
My family is all from the Southwest. My great-great-grandfather was at the Battle of San Jacinto with Sam Houston.
When I moved to New York out of college, that was my goal. To be a stage actress. And to do dramatic works. Like ‘Madea’, and ‘Night, Mother’, and ‘Sam Shepard’, and all that kind of stuff. That’s what I really wanted to do.
Sam Shepard is – I didn’t tell this to Sammy, but if I had to point to one artist that made me want to do this for my life, it’s Sam Shepard.
We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You’re making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you’re going to look to those guys.
My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.
I’ve always adored the filmmaker Sam Fuller. The first time I watched ‘Shock Corridor’ was such a magnificent discovery. I love his lack of subtlety, the way he tackles serious topics with bold and inappropriate humor.
I’m coming from a Ginuwine and Usher background: slow and smooth songs. And that’s why I really connected to Sam Cooke, because he was just very smooth. It’s not like the James Brown types, which is all great stuff, but he was totally set apart from those guys.
President Reagan likes to say Uncle Sam is a kindly old man with a spine of steel, and that he is. But I want to see Uncle Sam as well with a mind and with a heart and with a soul and a conscience.
I love the pioneers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, but when I write music, it comes out in my own way.
Oh boy, I grew up hearing Sam Cooke, The Soul Stirrers, Mahalia Jackson, sitting on Mahalia Jackson’s lap in my dad’s church.
When ‘Titanic’ came out on VHS, I was working at a Sam’s Club, which is already the worst. I don’t know what you know about working for the Walton family, but it’s horrific.
Additionally, this tax forces family businesses to invest in Uncle Sam rather than the economy. When families are forced to repurchase businesses because of the death tax, that means less money is being invested in new jobs and capital expansion.
They all matter to me, whether I’m working on a Sam Jackson film for a week or I’m the star of my own TV series – I take it all very seriously, and I have a healthy respect for the work in general, despite the role.
Estee Lauder cologne. Sam Cooke always wore it, and I started wearing it because he wore it.
I’m dying to do a Sam Shepard play. ‘Curse of the Starving Class,’ ‘Buried Child,’ ‘True West,’ ‘Cowboy Mouth,’ ‘Fool for Love’ – I’ll do any of them.
Yeah, we’re trying to learn from Sam Walton, learn from competition, and on a global basis be able to be the very best as we try to bring it all together.
Sam Walton was a master storyteller who used illustrative stories to reinforce his cultural standards.
Clearly, the works of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi are front and center here. Argento is definitely there. But even stuff like the ‘Friday the 13th’ movies had quite an influence on me growing up.
I love pop music, but I feel like the genre is overpopulated – there was so much bubblegum for a while, but I feel like Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran are bringing good, real music back to the radio.
I worked for Sam Peckinpah on quite a bit of action in his films, and he got excited once in a while.
I was influenced by American movies of the ’60s and ’70s, especially Don Siegel’s ‘Dirty Harry’ and the films of Sam Peckinpah. And, of course, a lot of the film noir movies of the ’40s.
I dreamed of being like Sam Seaborn on ‘The West Wing’.
Smaller tax refunds are not a bad thing – they’re a sign that people are keeping more of their money as they earn it, rather than letting Uncle Sam keep it under his mattress for them.
I think every actor, you can say, has at one point decided to slack, phone it in. But Sean Penn shows up every day and does his job, and the character’s always different. Always. ‘Carlito’s Way,’ ‘I am Sam,’ ‘Sweet and Lowdown.’
I look at the progressive policies that have marginalized black dads. They push them to the side and say, ‘You’re not needed.’ Uncle Sam is going to be the dad: he’s going to provide for the kids; he’s going to feed the kids.
Sam and Dean Winchester sitting on the top of the Impala sharing their feelings over a beer is a reward worth driving any ‘Supernatural’ demon away – but in real life, they’d have crippling co-dependency issues.
The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It’s a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest.
I think it’s OK if somebody likes my music and likes Sam Hunt’s music, too. And I think if we’re both selling records, it’s good for everybody. I think it allows other records to get made.
I think meeting someone like, meeting Sam Shepard, that was someone who was kind of important for me, because I’d read so much of his work and watched him as an actor since I was a kid, then being on set doing a scene with him and thinking, ‘This is really surreal.’
I’m not saying that Sam J. Jones was Flash Gordon – there’s no such thing. No actor can be the person, that’s a bunch of crap. People pay to see an actor be himself, whether he plays Hamlet or whatever.
I’ve worked with people from Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, through to Richard Fleischer, all of those boys from Hollywood and so on, and Sam Peckinpah and then the Mike Radfords.
My great-grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario, and he was also an Edwardian spiritualist researcher who was very interested in what was going on in the invisible world, the survival of the consciousness, precipitated paintings, mediumship, and trans-channeling.
I was 23 years old. It was a wild time. I was covering everything that blew up – blackouts, Studio 54, son of Sam killer, and all of that stuff.
When I first met Sam Mendes, I was a bit confused and said to him, ‘I’m 50 years old. What am I going to do at 50 in a Bond film?’
Michael Sam will help us, and we’ll give him every chance to succeed, and you know what? It’s gonna be pretty cool.
When the rule of law is being perverted to the rule of the ‘good intentions’ of unelected judges, it is time for serious study of Thomas Paine and Sam Adams as much as Washington and Madison.
